Terrifier, 3/10, a piece of crap
Having experienced something of a gorehound awakening in recent years and seeing the sequel to this get some buzz last year, I bought the 2-pack for these movies for like 5 bucks. Terrifier is a deliberate throwback to the early days of 80s slasher movies where a group of women get terrorized and brutalized by a sadistic killer. And turns out this is the bad kind of throwback, the one where you go "thank god we've moved past this". This feels like a movie from a bygone age, the kind which you find in the discount bin of the video rental store to watch when you're too young, and just fast forwarding to the juicy bits. Because jesus, this movie is a fucking snooze. And its monumentally bog-standard premise of consisting mostly of women getting brutalized just feels nasty and retrograde in this day and age. I'm not even gonna let it have the zero-budget defense (this was made for only $35,000), because there are films with matching budgets that look way better, have way better acting, writing, pacing and everything. I fast forwarded through what felt like half of this movie, and missed nothing.
The overexposed lighting makes it look super cheap and shitty, even while the movie itself is somewhat decently shot and the dilapidated building it takes place in has some atmosphere to it. The acting is basically porn quality. They do basically every crappy slasher cliché played completely straight, which is just fucking stupid. This was made in 2016, that kind of shit doesn't fly anymore! Most of the movie is spent watching tissue thin characters slowly skulking around samey environments with zero tension, atmosphere or stakes. It's only a little over 80 minutes long, and there's probably 10, at best 15 minutes of entertainment to be had in it.
How's the gore then? Pretty good to be honest, the practical effects look quite good and it's nice and juicy. But there's so little of it in the runtime that there is no way I could in good conscience recommend this on that alone. The only redeeming thing about this movie is the star of the show, Art the Clown, who's played by a real life mime. He's the entire conceit this movie rests on, and though he by no means saves this dreck, he is so good in the role that any time he's on screen the film's score jumps by like 5 points. He has zero spoken dialogue, and in fact doesn't make any sort of sounds at all in the movie. So he's essentially acting as if he's in a silent movie, and he's just magnificent. He conveys tons of personality and presence through physicality and expression alone, and manages to thread the needle between genuinely terrifying and darkly funny, between inhuman monster and being weirdly vulnerable. He is a superstar, and it's such a shame he's in such a piece of trash.
So yeah, a 9/10 performance in a 2/10 movie. Skip this and just watch a compilation of Art's scenes on Youtube or something.
en.wikipedia.org
