If you were to give the Academy Award for Best Performance to a silent clown who wears a white clown suit and pretends to chuckle while cutting off people’s faces (please don’t do this at home, you should laugh silently) Rock the never-before-seen mascot of slasher mayhem, Art the Clown, the depraved mascot and murderer of ‘Terrifier 3’.
Art the Clown was to Freddie, Jason, and Michael Myers what the Sex Pistols were to the Who or the Stones: their punk endpoint and scandalous apex. Back in the good old days, slasher movies were all about masked superhumans cutting off people’s limbs or skewering them with a meat cleaver. (How outlandish.) “Saw” and its sequels featured characters subjected to complex mechanical torture and every conceivable form of mutilation (“Each victim receives his due…” There was a joke added. You may be wondering how a “Terrifier” movie could top that.
The answer has to do with what Art the Clown and Kamala Harris have in common: the joy factor. Implicit in every slasher movie is some knife-wielding, chainsaw-wielding guy justifying what they’re doing. It goes back to his grandfather’s work, “Psycho”. That’s part of the scary thing. They love what they do, so you can’t convince them to quit.
However, Art the Clown uses the following concept: I’m enjoying it From murderous sadism to a new level of sick puppy madness. In all three Terrifire movies, the character is played by an actor named David Howard Thornton, who wears white makeup, a hooked nose, a bald clown headgear, a mouth with black lipstick, and dirty rotten licorice. He has disappeared into a costume with teeth that look like this. It’s all covered up by his little top hat, which leans that way, like something borrowed from a nun. From within the costume, Thornton gives an outrageous performance with a divine air, like Marcel Marceau with the demonic spirit of Charles Manson. In the manner of a silent clown, he imitates ordinary human emotions – grinning, wide-eyed surprise, innocent facial expressions, cartoonish sad grimaces – with stylized frivolity. He’s going to mock and mirror back to you what you’re feeling right before he cuts off your leg or disembowels you like a stuck pig.
The ultra-violent and sleazy movie “Terrifier” started as an underground phenomenon, but has now become a mall theater franchise with a backstory as complex as the “Scream” movies. At the New York premiere of Terrifier 3 that I attended earlier this week, the audience was treated to a whirlwind of cult celebrity and goth party chic, demonstrating that these films have become established brands. (The novelty doll in Art the Clown’s possession was similar.)
In “Terrifier 3,” Sienna (Lauren LaVera), the series’ heroine/final girl, is discharged from a mental hospital (she’s been in and out of the hospital) and goes to live with her aunt Jessica (Margaret Ann). I will stay. Florence), Jessica’s husband Greg (Bruce Johnson), and their child Gabby (Antonella Rose). There’s a lot of discussion at the kitchen table about everything that happened before, maybe too much.
Damian Leone, the series’ flashy and inventive writer-director, knows how to stage a splatter opera with an opening fanfare in which a family falls apart. But he’s not exactly a wizard of expository dialogue. He makes these movies on the cheap and has a quality that’s out of the system. They are basically a collection of set pieces. And the flashback in which Art the Clown, who was decapitated at the end of the previous movie, is strangely restored by Victoria (Samantha Scafidi), who becomes his one-eyed, rotting, walking assistant, is like a highlight reel. It will be played. “Re-Animator” scenes are displayed in random order. At 2 hours and 18 minutes, “Terrifier 2” was a more seamless piece of filmmaking.
But “Terrifier 3,” with an “E” for Extreme, does an ace job of both winking and fulfilling the franchise’s expectations by setting up Art the Clown as a fake Santa Claus causing mayhem at Christmas. There is a gimmick. After freezing his limbs with nitrous oxide and smashing them to pieces with a hammer, he steals the costume from an off-duty store Santa. The film’s prosthetics and makeup effects were created by Christian Tinsley, a man of depraved practical magic reminiscent of early Rob Bottin (The Thing).
A moment later, as we wince, and perhaps a little marvel, at Art the Clown’s slaughterhouse ingenuity, he pulls out a very classic instrument of death: a chainsaw, and we wondered what he was going to do with the new one. Now, here’s the problem. In every chainsaw murder you’ve ever seen on screen, all you see is… that’s it. (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is famously understated in its gore for all its poetic nightmare splendor.) But Damian Leone and Art the Clown The sequel will show us something without scenes. That helped “Scarface” earn an X rating. It begins with two naked college students fornicating in the shower, at which point Art, as Santa, peeks through the shower door, begins cutting off hands and limbs, and inserts a chainsaw between the man’s buttocks, at which point Art The party begins. I’m just getting started.
The climax of the movie features a squirming rat, a large glass tube stuck in its throat, and a head with a brain carved into it, making you wonder, “Who was that?” (The revealing details are witty in a terrible way.) “Terrifier 3” is two hours long, which makes you wonder why they would show a violent exploitation porn movie that is usually on the shorter side. You might think so. , would be a long smorgasbord of such gruesomeness. But that’s part of what “Terrifier” fans crave: full immersion in depravity. The fear is on the screen, but in another sense it is in the audience. It lies in the fact that a significant portion of the mainstream audience now considers this entertainment. I don’t mean to sound too critical. I am one of them. Back in the days of Friday the 13th Part III and A Nightmare on Elm Street 4, I’ve always found slasher sequels boring. Still, the possibility of another “Terrifier” movie doesn’t disappoint me in the same way. It leaves me with a kind of suspense: what in the name of hell will Art the Clown do next?