First off, to be clear, I didn’t love Terrifier. The first feature film for “new horror icon” Art The Clown, Terrifer had some great gore gags, but suffered from a distinct lack of any actual plot, and uneven pacing. I just think the character works better in the short films he first appeared in, including his appearance in the horror anthology flick All Hallow’s Eve (also from writer-director Damien Leone).
So you might have already guessed how I feel about Terrifier 2, a film that follows the gory exploits of Art The Clown for over 2 hours. There is, once again, very little actual plot, the pacing is still an issue, and it all feels like a bit of a slog in between far-too-infrequent highlights.
I know I am in the minority here, and I certainly don’t want to take anything away from Leone or David Howard Thornton, the actor who has helped to make his killer clown character so memorable, but I really wish Art The Clown had stayed as a character used in short films and anthology movies. It is hard to deny, however, that Art HAS become a new horror icon, despite me placing that phrase in quotation marks in the first paragraph to show my resistance to that idea when the first feature was released. He has a great look, there is a mischievous side to all of the nastiness and killing, and many horror fans already consider him a firm favourite.
The gore here is extremely squelchy and bloody, although I’m not sure that anything here truly warrants the headlines you may have seen (all about cinema audience members who fainted or vomited, or were shaken to their very core). Every gag benefits from great practical FX work, but everything is also pushed further and further, to the point of comedic exaggeration. Unfortunately, once you have seen how far the film will go, in terms of the blood and gore, every other death scene feels a bit tiresome. There is no escalation, you cannot be shocked if the opening scenes have already leaned so hard into the extreme, and that makes everything a bit more boring than it should be.
In my preferred version of this film (and what do I know? the film has already been massively successful), Art is given more moments that focus on the absurdity and humour. There is a great sequence with him being a pesky customer in a shop that I wanted to see more of, but it all has to end in yet another gory death. I also loved almost every scene that had Art accompanied by a childish evil spirit (played brilliantly by Amelie McLain), but nothing was satisfyingly developed there either, allowing it to be another aspect of the film that peaked when it first occurred.
Aside from Thornton and McLain, both excellent, there’s a very likable lead performance from Lauren LaVera as Sienna, a young woman who may have the power to destroy Art, and Elliott Fullam is very good as Sienna’s younger brother, Jonathan. There are many other people onscreen, but they all merge into one collage of gory murder in my mind. That’s what happens when you make a movie putting gory murders ahead of anything like plot or character (another great shame, because Sienna and Jonathan have great potential, when not sidelined in favour of yet another gore gag).
Fair play to Leone. He has managed to make the movies that he has wanted to make, as far as I can tell, and a large part of the horror community has responded positively to his work. With that winning combo of Art The Clown and so many genuinely impressive practical effects, it’s easy to see why. I have just never been won over.
If you like the main character and you want a load of bloodshed then you will find enough to enjoy here. But if you are looking for anything else (from quality production design to fun dialogue, from interesting supporting players to satisfying character arcs) then you will need to look elsewhere. Oh, a bonus point for the excellent score by Paul Wiley. That is it though. There just wasn’t enough here, for me, to lift this above average.
4/10
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