Linked to the Christmas horror subgenre ever created is this most graphic, horrific, and bloody film.
Entering the horror genre is challenging due to great competition and short public attention spans. This holds true for filmmakers as well as fictional works. Filmmaker turned makeup artist Damien Leone is quite aware of this. But sixteen years after first showing Art the Clown to the public via the short film “The 9th Circle,” the director and his creation have had unqualified success. Recently shown in theatres, the third Terrifier series installment upholds the legacy of presenting quite graphic and horrific crimes by a silent, sadistic clown with an unusual sense of comedy.
Sienna (Lauren LaVera) and her younger brother Jonathan (Elliott Fullam) killed Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton), a supernaturally charged killer, so stopping a horrible killing spree. Since the incident five years had passed. As the opening scene depicts, Art—dressed as Santa Claus— kills a whole family few nights before Christmas. Whether the victim is young child, female, or male, his axe is not biassed. One of the problems with supernatural killers, of course, is their typically brief period of crime. Art has once more seen the return of festive theme carnage. Sienna must grudgingly mount her horse once more to confront the evil painted on her face once she leaves the mental hospital.
Should you have liked Leone’s indie film Terrifier 3, a box office smash in 2022, you should be ready for a graphic experience. While Art viciously slashes, burns, hacks, and cuts across the supporting cast, Sienna is negotiating the exposition phase of the story. Fans of real gore won’t be let down since Leone and her friends are once more committing some quite spectacular crimes against human flesh, even if none of the deaths in this film are as horrific as the murder that happened in the bedroom in the last film on the sadistic scale. If he had provided the rhythm and written more deliberately, it would have been amazing.
Complicating the work is useless since Leone offers plenty and knows what the audience wants. Still, this is the work at hand. Though it was still a poor attempt to establish a mythology, Terrifier 2 was a major improvement over Terrifier (2016) concerning the plot’s and character’s development. Terrifier 3 has more details, but Leone is generally making mistakes as he goes along. Furthermore absent from his presentation of Art, Sienna, and their path together is a narrative core. Though much-discussed magical sword meant to “kill any evil” is still a flimsy MacGuffin; even worse, despite being more than two hours long, this chapter seems to be unfinished; the rules are not strictly followed.
Still, the Christmas theme makes Terrifier 3 more like a diversion from the franchise. It gives a taste of seasonal horror without much developing the central plot. Starting with the first scene—in which “Santa” visits a house— Leone does rather a good job. From this house to an exciting visit with a mall Santa loaded with gifts, restless parents, and happy children, the production design with a holiday theme is clear all through the story. Though Art covers a tree with intestinal garland at one point in the story, it still seems like a lost opportunity for many more deaths linked to Christmas.
LeVera and Thornton both remain superb in their roles as the final girl and the relentless killer, respectively, despite their characters still feel as though they are a body that has been disembowelled. LeVera is going through yet another experience, but she combines her fear and anger to enable her to bear the whole horror of it. Conversely, Thornton fulfils us with his horrible sense of humour and relentless need to hurt other people while yet reflecting all we despise about mimes. The fact that Art is not scary does not change the fact that sometimes his perfect work-life balance and unquestionable sense of humour inspire respect of him.
Though it will be a few more years before we can evaluate whether Art the Clown has really seized the horror zeitgeist to the extent he finds a place in mainstream culture, there is no doubt he has made major advancements in a rather short period. Comprising two short films and two feature films—the latter of which made almost sixteen million dollars in cinemas on a budget of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars—Terrifier 3 will most certainly follow that upward trend.
People looking for a gloomy and darkly comic kind of entertainment will find appeal in a horror movie like Terrifier 3. The film stars a psychotic clown prone to graphic dismemberment and other kinds of wanton violence. Leone can then vividly depict the most agonising, humiliating, and graphically violent assaults on a human body, so bringing those ideas to life. The cliffhanger ending degrades viewers even after two hours of viewing; the story lacks suspense and the characters and plot are shallow. Although it uses a chainsaw to remove it from memory, this shower kill honours the one that happened in Pieces (1982). Every single one of these will definitely appeal to horror aficionados, who search for an exciting cinematic experience on the big screen and know the movie is a work of fiction. Leone also meets the demand more than ready.
