Terrifier 3 (2024)

So . . . I didn't love Terrifier. And I certainly didn't love Terrifier 2. I've not really been a fan of the combination of Damien Leone and Art the Clown since All Hallow's Eve. Which means that I can understand why people would question why I would even give Terrifier 3 the time of day. Well, first of all, I keep hoping for the series to reach the potential it has. Second, it's important to actually watch every movie that you want to have an opinion on. If I disliked, or dismissed, Terrifier 3 without even watching it then people could quite rightly ignore my ignorant take on it. Every unwatched movie has a chance to be great, no matter what you thought of any prequels, sequels, or other elements connected to it. Oh, and I saw that it was basically a Christmas horror movie, and I do like to add any new Christmas horror movies to my schedule at this time of year.

In a way that almost completely proves my point, Terrifier 3 turns out to be the best of the series so far. I'm not sure if a full plot summary is required here. Art the Clown (played once again by David Howard Thornton) ends up on another killing spree, accompanied by the seriously mutilated Victoria (Samantha Scaffidi). It's surely only a matter of time until they relocate the plucky Sienna (Lauren LaVera), who is now living with her uncle and aunt (played by Bryce Johnson and Margaret Anne Florence, respectively).

Whether Leone now has more freedom and scope to play around, or whether the film is simply helped enormously by juxtaposing the bloodshed of Art with the festive decor of Christmas, Terrifier 3 is almost as great as I always wanted the series to be. The gore and nastiness are still there, and those seeking it out will be satisfied, but there's a gleeful tone to the carnage that makes it a much better viewing experience. While I have been impressed by the extended torture and kill scenes in previous instalments in this series, they were often undeniably grim. This has a playfulness to it that helps to break up the vomit-inducing gore gags. The script still needs some work, it's too long and gets a bit tiresome when interrupting the flow of the whole thing to build the mythology of the series, but it's a step up from everything else that came before it.

The cast, aside from Thornton, Scaffidi, and LaVera, are largely irrelevant. They're not bad, far from it, but they're all available to be potential victims of Art, and they just don't get any chance to steal any scenes away from the three main cast members who spend the majority of the runtime as sides of a triangle that viewers know will be fully formed before the end credits roll. There are also some fun cameos, including Jason Patric, Tom Savini, and Chris Jericho, but the other names worth mentioning are the legendary Clint Howard and Daniel Roebuck, with the latter portraying the Santa actor who finds himself in big trouble when Art takes a liking to his beard and traditional garb.

If Leone can find a way to do this again, make use of Art in a way that skewers something traditionally full of good feeling and warmth, then he might be able to take this series from strength to strength. Maybe have Art hiding out in a religious community, or pretending he has been asked to teach mime to kindergarten kids, or maybe interrupting dates on Valentine's Day with people thinking he is about to deliver a message of love before he instead delivers painful death. You get the idea. Art works best when he is being dark AND silly, and dark and silly works best when shown alongside something light and earnest.

7/10

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Terrifier 2 (2022)

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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The Well (2023)

I'll be repeating things already said by others while reviewing The Well, but that just shows that it has a very certain appeal to horror fans, and it succeeds in what it sets out to do. Because, as you may have already been made aware, this is a film that feels very much like a throwback to the gory Euro-horrors of the 1980s and early '90s.

Lauren LaVera plays Lisa, a young woman who ends up in a large house in the middle of nowhere as she sets about restoring a very damaged painting. Lisa encountered a group of young travellers on the way to her job, and the movie shows those people being put in peril, and grievous bodily harm, as Lisa starts to suspect that something is amiss at her place of temporary employment. Her employer, Emma (Claudia Gerini), needs Lisa to hit a very specific deadline, but Emma's daughter, Giulia (played by Linda Zampaglione), doesn't want the job finished.

Although there are enough people in the cast to keep the deadly set-pieces flowing throughout the runtime, this is based very much around our three leads and one hulking killer who seems to live to supply the titular well with fresh meat. The killer is an enjoyably horrifying menace, but everyone is given just enough to make themselves feel worth spending some time with just before a potentially grisly demise, which is a pleasant surprise when evaluating the cheesy script co-written by Stefano Masi and director Federico Zampaglione (and yes, that is his daughter cast in the role of Giulia). The dialogue might not tickle your earlobes, but there's enough done to identify people as individuals and have viewers retaining a small hope that one or two escape their predicament.

Zampaglione knows exactly what he is making, and he moves into each gory set-piece with gusto, getting in close whenever flesh is being chopped and limbs are being removed. The unfolding "mystery" is pretty obvious, but our lead character is helpfully motivated to stick around by the young girl that she ends up feeling protective of.

LaVera is an excellent lead, and already quite the horror celeb due to her role in the Terrifier movie series, and she's easy to spend time with, and root for when things start getting even more dangerous for her in the third act. Gerini is enjoyably shifty, as expected, as is Zampaglione, and both slightly overact in that way that helps the film feel more in line with the films that it is emulating than any slicker modern horrors. I'm not going to pretend that I could spot all of the other cast members in any line-up, but I stand by the opinion that they're all helped just enough by the script to make themselves feel like more than bodybags-in-waiting.

It's not interested in being clever or revolutionary, but The Well is a hell of a lot of bloody fun. Horror movie fans should have a good time with it, and it shows how you can craft something that has memorable kills AND a decent enough narrative moving between the set-pieces.

7/10

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Prime Time: All Hallow's Eve 2 (2015)

Almost everyone seemed to enjoy All Hallow’s Eve, at least to some degree, the horror anthology movie that introduced horror fans to Art the clown. So it is no surprise to see that a sequel was made. What is slightly surprising, although also an obvious approach, is the fact that this is one of those horror anthology movies created by making use of a handful of talented people all delivering their own tales. Damien Leone, the writer-director of the first movie, was probably already too busy developing the Terrifier movies to deliver more Art “hijinks” for his fans.

The framing device here involves a young woman who has received a videotape on her doorstep. There also seems to be someone watching her. Slightly perturbed, but not half as anxious as I would be, she decides to watch the tape, which contains a mix of tales all revolving around Halloween.

With a film like this, based around so many different writers and directors, using a cast that doesn’t really have any familiar faces in the mix (the only one I immediately recognised was the excellent Bill Oberst Jr), it’s hard to sit down and write out an informative and all-encompassing review. If I went into enough detail here then you would just be reading a page full of names, and there are many other places on the internet to just read film credits.

That is also a good sign though. I don’t have any one person I want to single out, for good or bad, and that shows just how surprisingly consistent this movie is. I still have favourite tales (“Jack Attack” and “The Last Halloween” help the movie get off to a strong start), but I enjoyed pretty much everything presented here. Of course I liked some more than others, but there wasn’t any one take that I loathed.

The biggest downside is the lack of any strong through-line. The Halloween theme may be good enough to loosely link the tales together, but there’s a disappointing lack of flow as we move abruptly from one to the next, and it’s a shame that there was no room for any scenes allowing some more bleed over. There are also some sequences that look worse than others, but that just adds to the feeling of people really putting blood, sweat, and tears into getting their films made.

The cast generally do good work, everyone is clearly making the most of relatively limited resources, and there is a surprisingly high hit rate when it comes to the “punchline” of every segment. Although I didn’t absolutely love it, I would put this on a par with the first film. It’s a perfect choice for the spooky season, providing an entertaining variety of thrills and chills without outstaying its welcome.

6/10

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In A Violent Nature (2024)

Remember the joke in Clerks II when a character dismisses The Lord Of The Rings trilogy by boiling it down to various scenes of people walking? That same dismissive criticism could be levelled at In A Violent Nature, the new horror film that has made a name for itself by aligning viewers more closely with the slasher villain at the heart of it.

Written and directed by Chris Nash, who has a number of shorts to his credit already (as well as make up credits in other features), this is the simple tale of a man walking through the woods and picking off some unsuspecting victims. The deadly events are triggered by a locket being moved, which motivates Johnny (Ry Barrett) to kill and kill again, at least until he can regain possession of the locket and go back to a temporary state of peaceful death again.

There's not too much to discuss here, in many ways. The cinematography is fine, the sound mix allows viewers to hear ongoing conversations that help to contextualise things while Johnny continues on his plodding journey (giving you snippets of moments that you'd expect to see from a different angle in any standard slasher movie), and the cast are all very disposable.

I know to credit Barrett as Johnny, and he deserves to be singled out for a physical performance that allows Johnny to feel deserving of being alongside the classic masked killers of the sub-genre (in terms of the presentation of him, if nothing else). Elsewhere, however, I had to be reminded of the other cast members, and cannot say that many of them stand out from the crowd. Andrea Pavlovic, Cameron Love, Reece Presley, Liam Leone, Charlotte Creaghan, Lea Rose Sebastianis, and everyone else involved do what they're asked to do, although that isn't much. They are fodder, and I will be very surprised if anyone watches this film with their eye on any one character they hope to see make it to the end credits.

A slasher movie is often rated based on how well the kills are executed though, no pun intended, and this is where In A Violent Nature wins some big bonus points. There are some great kills in this, and one of them is quite possibly the best I've ever seen. They're brutal and nasty, but shown in a way that showcases the special effects without feeling as lascivious and troublesome as the kind of extended sequences we recently saw in the Terrifier movies, to grab for the first example that springs to mind. If Nash had worked more on the rest of the scenes surrounding the kills, especially an interminable final sequence that ends the film with a whimper instead of any climactic scream, then this could have been a modern classic. Sadly, he doesn't do that, and that ending is hard to forgive.

I enjoyed a lot of this, and was willing it to completely win me over, but it doesn't quite get enough right. If you're presenting a slasher movie with a lot of "behind the scenes" moments that we don't usually see, you need to do it with more wit, inventiveness, and passion. This is an interesting exercise, but it all too often feels like it is most interested in being exactly that.

5/10

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