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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