If they gave the Oscar for Best Performance to a silent clown who wears a white clown suit and can imitate a chuckle while slicing up people’s faces (don’t try this at home – the slicing or silent laughter), the award would be a lock for Art the Clown, the mascot you’ve never seen before. I’ve seen her before, she’s the corrupt mascot/assassin in “Terrifier 3”.
Art the Clown is to Freddie, Jason, and Michael Myers what the Sex Pistols are to the Who and the Stones: their sinister endpoint, their scandalous climax. In the good old days, slasher movies were about masked skeletons chopping off people’s limbs or dismembering them with butcher knives. (How weird.) “Saw” and its sequels upped the ante, with characters subjected to complex torture with robotic tools that included every form of dismemberment imaginable (with an added joke: every victim deserves it!). You’re probably wondering: How can the “Terrifier” movies top that?
The answer has to do with something Art the Clown and Kamala Harris have in common: the joy factor. It’s implied in every horror movie – going back to the granddaddy of them all, “Psycho” – that men with kitchen knives and saws go terrified at what they’re doing. And that’s part of what’s scary – they love their job, so you’re not going to convince them to stop.
But Art the Clown takes the concept Enjoy The sadism of murder takes new levels of sick puppy madness. The character is played in all three “Terrifier” films by David Howard Thornton, an actor who disappears into his costume: white makeup, aquiline nose, bald clown headdress, black lipstick mouth, and rotten licorice teeth that look as if they were borrowed from the nun, all Covered by his beanie, which is designed in this way. From within this costume, Thornton gives a wonderful performance, as Marcel Marceau possessed by the demonic spirit of Charles Manson, with a touch of the divine. In the manner of a silent clown, he imitates ordinary human emotions—the wide-eyed smiles and surprise, the innocent nostrils, the cartoonish, sad frowns—in a trivial, stylized way. He will mock and mirror how he feels back to you, before hacking off your legs or disemboweling you like a stuck pig.
The “Terrifier” films, which are extremely sordid in their extreme violence, began as an underground phenomenon, but have now morphed into a chain of mall cinemas with a complex backstory, much like the “Scream” films. At the New York premiere of “Terrifier 3” earlier this week, the audience was a collection of celebrities and goth chic partygoers, showing that these films have arrived as a brand. (So did the new puppets in Art the Clown’s hands.)
In “Terrifier 3,” Sienna (Lauren Lavera), who emerges as the series’ protagonist/final girl, is released from a psychiatric hospital (she’s been in and out of it) and goes to stay with her aunt Jessica (Margaret Ann). Florence), Jessica’s husband Greg (Bruce Johnson), and their child Gabe (Antonella Rose). There are a lot of discussions at the kitchen table, perhaps too much of it, among all that has come before.
Damien Leone, the series’ creative writer-director, knows how to deliver a sparse opera to the opening fanfare in which a family is hacked to pieces. But he’s not exactly an expository dialogue therapist. He makes these films on the cheap, and they are of out-of-order quality; They are basically sets of set pieces. Victoria (Samantha Scafidi), who became his one-eyed assistant who rots and walks on his corpse, plays flashbacks in which Victoria (Samantha Scafidi), who becomes his one-eyed assistant who rots and walks on his corpse, plays flashbacks to the past, in which Victoria (Samantha Scafidi), who became his one-eyed assistant who rots and walks on his corpse, plays flashbacks to the past, which was decapitated at the end of the last film. Showing scenes from the movie Re-Animator out of order. At two hours and 18 minutes, “Terrifier 2” was a much smoother film in its filmmaking.
But “Terrifier 3” puts the “E” in Extreme mode, and it has a cool gimmick, one that both winks and delivers on the series’ expectations, when it sets up Art the Clown as a fake Santa Claus unleashing Christmas mayhem. He steals his costume from an off-duty Santa after freezing his limbs with nitrous oxide, causing them to crumble into dust when a hammer crashes. The film’s prosthetics and makeup effects were created by Kristen Tinsley, who works a depraved practical magic that reminds me of early Rob Bottin (“The Thing”).
A little later, as we step back, and perhaps marvel a little, at Art the Clown’s ingenuity in the slaughterhouse, he pulls out an instrument of death so classic—the chainsaw—that we wonder what he’ll do with this new one. Well, that’s it. In every chainsaw murder you’ve ever seen on screen, you only see… a lot. (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, in its nightmarish, poetic grandeur, is famous for its less gore.) But Damian Leone and Art the Clown will show you what a Chain Saw sequel is, and there’s no scene in it. This helped get “Scarface” an all-time X rating. We start off with two naked college students fornicating in the shower, at which point Art, like Santa, saws through the shower door, then starts cutting off hands and limbs, then places that saw directly between the guy’s buttocks, at which point the party just gets started.
The film’s climax features squirming rats, a large glass tube being inserted down someone’s throat, and a head sculpted to the brain until we wonder, “Who was that?” (The identity-revealing details are, in a terrible way, ingenious.) “Terrifier 3” is two hours long, and you might wonder why a pornographic film would exploit violence, a genre that’s usually short. , such a prolonged variety would be hideous. But that’s part of what “Terrifier” fans crave: complete immersion in depravity. The horror appears on the screen, but in another sense it is present in the audience. It is a fact that a large segment of viewers now consider this as entertainment. I don’t mean to sound too judgmental; I am one of them. Back in the days of “Friday the 13th Part III” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street 4,” I always found the sequels boring. However, the prospect of another “Terrifier” movie doesn’t dampen my spirits in the same way. It leaves me in a bit of suspense: what the hell is Art the Clown going to do next?