It’s about time.

Terrifier is one of those films made for How About Notflix, so it’s really a shock that I haven’t watched this film yet. Incidentally Terrifier is not the first appearance of the character Art the Clown. Director Damien Leone directed a short back in 2011 called Terrifier and in 2013 directed an anthology film All Hallow’s Eve starring the clown serial killer. In 2015 he directed Frankenstein Vs. The Mummy, which the reviews state is misleading and the two only fight for a few minutes at most.

Written by some other guy named Damien Leone, Terrifier is definitely a horror slasher film. It stars Jenna Kanell as Tara, a woman who has many important things to teach us about life. For example sometimes drunk driving is the safer and more reasonable option. I’m not entirely sure if it’s legal for me to say that. But in this case driving drunk was probably the better option. Tara gets some drunk-ass pizza with her best friend drunk Dawn (Catherine Corcoran) and the two encounter a scary clown man who seems obsessed with Tara.

Bippity boppity, two dead Italian pizza men later and Tara and Dawn find themselves on the being hunted end of a slasher film. The two end up in a warehouse with some other colorful folk and the rest of the movie is Art the Clown going through and killing people one by one in various gruesome ways. There are a lot of practical effects in the movie and they all look pretty damn good.

Second major lesson; if you have the upper hand, make use of it. Horror film buffs might find themselves a bit annoyed at how many times Tara gains the upper hand and has Art on his knees only to hit him once and run off. Like any film of its caliber, Terrifier thrives on its characters doing the dumbest things at the most inopportune times, like the janitor with the headphones in and cranked so loud that he can’t hear anything around him.

By the way, David Howard Thornton is miles ahead of the rest of the cast in this movie in terms of acting chops. Art does not speak throughout the whole film, so he has to use his facial expressions and body movement in order to get the point across. Which he does exceptionally well. We get a glimpse in the beginning of Art just putting on his makeup and getting ready for a night out on the town. What’s his backstory? His motivation? His personality? He’s a crazy clown who is going to murder people. Art can be both deeply unsettling and maniacally goofy when the scene calls for it, switching seamlessly back and forth.

Also he has no story because why would you need that. And neither do the other characters. Tara and Dawn are two drunk chicks out and about on Halloween. The two Italian dudes are Italians making pizza for drunk chicks. The only character whose personality you can read into is played by Pooya Mohseni, a cat lady who carries around a doll she refers to as her child. I have seen enough drama movies and games to know the backstory of a depressed woman who is incredibly protective of a visual device representing her child. Cat lady has more breadth in this film than pretty much everyone else combined.

But the film ultimately serves as a vehicle to show Leone’s practical effect skills, and he is definitely hung in the practical department. The film is so over the top with its brutality that it rolls around to being completely unrealistic and therefore your brain has no trouble enjoying it. The characters who inevitably become Art’s victims are so devoid of realistic presence that they too end up being hard to particularly root for or sympathize with. They are very clearly actors thrust into a film to be butchered for our amusement.

That being said, it is oddly long for an hour and a half film. While I would say that the film is fun for a good while, I got bored in the third act. There was six years between Terrifier and Terrifier 2, and I think I’ll take a little break before I watch the sequel. The funniest thing about Terrifier 3 is that it is absolutely murdering Joker 2 in the box office this past weekend.

Rating: B