Terrifier 2 Review: Carnival of Carnage

The killer in Terrifier 2, Art the Clown, has a hooked nose that resembles something out of an anti-Semitic caricature from the 1930s, a small top hat cocked to the side of his head and a general attitude of it-only-hurts-you-when-I-laugh blood-soaked dementia. He also has a white bald harlequin head cover and a jester costume with pom-pom buttons. Art's chuckle is quite memorable since it is quiet, similar to Marcel Marceau's. As he cuts, saws, skins, dismembers, and hurls acid in people's faces, he exudes a stylized joy close to that of Freddy Krueger channelling Liberace channelling Josef Mengele. 

Terrifier 2 Review

With a gleeful air and homicidal movements befitting a true maniac, David Howard Thornton plays Art the Clown, who totes around his arsenal of tool-box blades (a random heap of rusty knives, pliers, hacksaws, and so on) in a black garbage bag. We watch him do things like chase a victim into an office, where he hammers him in the face, bringing his weapon down with the force of the damned, then hammers him some more, then takes out his eyeball and plays with it, pries his face apart, and so on, all before cunningly disappears into an alleyway. And that was only the first scene! It's the film's way of asking, "Hi, how are ya?" to its viewers.

Damien Leone, who also created the visual effects, wrote and directed "Terrifier 2," a wretched blood feast that is a ready-made midnight-event cult classic. Six years have passed since Leone's 2016 debut "Terrifier," which turned Art into an underground horror mascot. Thus, the excitement has been mounting. With a total of $7.6 million so far, "Terrifier 2" has outperformed its predecessor, "Terrifier," which was reportedly created for a mere $250,000. But Leone was aware of what he had. The duration of the movie is both significant and, strangely enough, among its most horrifying aspects. "Terrifier 2" is an extended holiday-horror movie that plods around for two hours and eighteen minutes, primarily taking place on Halloween night. However, that aligns more or less with the mayhem-loving mindset of Art the Clown: More is more.

The picture, which takes place in a sort of slasher dreamscape, is a slaughterhouse burlesque that owes a great deal to Herschell Gordon Lewis, who created the splatter cinema genre 60 years ago with his films "Blood Feast" and "Two Thousand Maniacs." Lewis' gory creativity is evident throughout the work. The only true humor in "Terrifier 2," a horror comedy is how much carnage there is.

It was impossible to experience the unpleasant early 1980s slasher scene in any of the newer "Halloween" movies. However, "Terrifier 2" does and part of its charm lies in that. Aside from having a percolating one-man band synth-pop score that is straight out of the early 1980s, an old pre-cable TV set that keeps getting snow on it, expository B-movie dialogue, over-the-top no-budget acting, and a teenage heroine named Sienna who looks like a throwback scream queen (though Lauren LaVera, the actress, does a great job playing the part with a knowing lack of irony), the film is sluggishly paced. A psychotic clown posse of one is a kind of slasher that you wouldn't have encountered in the 1980s. Though mute, Art the Clown is a sly trickster who has the potential to be Pennywise's most outrageously gory student.

Terrifier 2 Rating, Reviews and Director

Running time: 138 MIN.

Director: Damien Leone

IMDb rating: 6.1/10

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 86% TOMATOMETER

Terrifier 2 Cast

Name	Character
Lauren LaVera	Sienna
David Howard Thornton	Art the Clown
Elliott Fullam	Jonathan
Sarah Voigt	Barbara
Kailey Hyman	Brooke
Casey Hartnett	Allie
Charlie McElveen	Jeff
Amelie McLain	The Little Pale Girl
Johnath Davis	Ricky
Samantha Scaffidi	Victoria Heyes
Leah Voysey	Clown Cafe Host…
Chris Jericho	Burke
Felissa Rose	Ms. Principe
Owen Myre	Sean
Griffin Santopietro	Eric
Devon Roth	Stephanie(as Devon L. Roth)
Amy Russ	Allie's Mom
Cory DuVal	Coroner

We got excited to see "Terrifier 2" since the genre we may refer to as Extreme Horror has sometimes seen a colourful creative spark throughout the past ten or so years. Thinking of movies that even a lot of horror fans find offensive, like Eli Roth's infinitely creepier and more accomplished "Hostel: Part II," which is a shivery and real film that was unfairly maligned by the brickbats that critics tend to use to attack these movies. I'm also thinking of Tom Six's outrageously revolting Euro disgusto carnival "The Human Centipede" and its even more psychotic shock-theatre sequel, "The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence). The film raised a question befitting of the dark web era: Are there affluent sickos out there who would take advantage of an underground business that charged an outrageous amount for the chance to torture and kill someone?

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