A night of savage terror and butchery commences when two drunk young women run afoul of Art (David Howard Thornton), a creepy, silent clown while sobering up and awaiting pickup for a ride home when they find their car's tire has a flat. As the sister of one of the girls to the rescue, the clown launches an ultra-sadistic and gory massacre, starting at a pizzeria and escalating within the confines a tenement building. With no rhyme or reason to this violent mayhem, the clown silently finds all the bloody, misery, and fear from his helpless victims to be hilarious, and as the night goes on, it's apparent that there is little hope of survival.
TERRIFIER has taken the world of horror fandom by storm since its release eight years ago, and I admit I am late to the party. I only first heard about it maybe a little over a year or two ago, but I did not really pay attention until it began getting a lot of buzz on the horror grapevine and when it generated two sequels. I went in expecting just another watered-down latter-day slasher entry, but what I got was a throwback to '80's-style slashers, only far superior in its crafting, and waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more extreme in its gut bucket visceral shocks. Art the Clown is one eerie motherfucker, and his gruesome misdeeds are
nothing short of some of the most shocking shit I have ever seen in a
professionally-made film.
There's no plot to speak of, other than the clown stalking and horribly murdering his victims for his amusement, but that doesn't matter, as the filmmakers all know that we are there for the mayhem and gore, and they kindly cared enough to bring us the best-made, nastiest-looking 85 minutes of 21st Century Théâtre du Grand-Guignol that one could ever hope for. And though there no plot as such, we get to know the protagonists during the first twenty minutes, and we come to quite like and care about them, so the ordeal that they are put through is nothing that we root for, even though we all want to see how extreme the nastiness can get. These are no mere ciphers like those found in damned near every other flick of this ilk, and I salute the filmmakers for bothering with making them actual characters with personalities.
A sequence that made me scream "OH, SHIT!!!" out loud.
Plotless and ultra-nasty/gory though TERRIFIER may be, it has one thing that few slasher films possess, and that's heart. This was clearly a labor of love by, to, and for those who know and love this oft-maligned sub-genre of horror, and it's hands down one of the best of its breed. I eagerly await experiencing its sequels.
Poster for the theatrical release.
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