The deaths remain grisly, but the pacing uneven in this new installment in Damien Leone’s horror franchise.
Nobody is pushing horror boundaries quite like the writer-director Damien Leone. Eight years ago, his killer clown film “Terrifier” had gorehounds buzzing. Its 2022 sequel unexpectedly broke into the mainstream and to date has earned over $15 million, a huge haul for a blood-drenched exploitation slasher.
Leone’s new “Terrifier” film sags under its predecessors’ trappings: a bloated running time, an unfocused script, uneven pacing. But when Leone steps on the gas with Art the Clown — the franchise’s signature psycho-butcher, fiendishly played again by David Howard Thornton — he gets a jump on Santa, delivering an extreme and gruesome early Christmas gift.
“Terrifier 3” picks up five years after the previous film but at Christmas, and Art is a killing machine in a Santa Claus suit. (It helps to have seen the first two films.) Art has a new monstrous female accomplice, Victoria (Samantha Scaffidi), who aids Art in inventively torturing and killing his victims, including death by intubated rodent tunnel.
Back are the ferocious final girl Sienna (Lauren LaVera) and her now college-aged brother, Jonathan (Elliott Fullam), who join new characters in fights to end Art’s unquenchable bloodthirst. Christien Tinsley, the prosthetics and makeup effects creator, is a ruthless master of decapitations and glistening viscera.
Devastated stomachs are badges of honor for “Terrifier” fans, and the great gut buster here comes when Art bombs a mall Santa meet-and-greet — a scene that makes “Silent Night, Deadly Night,” the once shocking evil St. Nick slasher, look like “Miracle on 34th Street.”
Terrifier 3
Not rated. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
