Terrifier (2017)
Directed by Damien Leone
Sometimes with horror movies you see the killer all over the place before you even know what the movie is. Terrifier is one of those. Man I saw gifs with this damn clown everywhere on twitter and facebook before I even knew it was from Terrifier. I thought, hell if this clown is showing up all over the place then this must be a decent movie. Plus it is a slasher movie and we all know my love for slasher movies. I added it to my list and gave it a watch.
The plot of this movie? Is there one? Not really. Shit kind of just happens with no backstory. You get two girls walking around after a Halloween party. They’re drunk and they go into a pizza place to grab a drunken meal. While waiting for food there is a creepy clown staring at the dark-haired girl creepily. The girls leave and are stalked by the clown whilst waiting for the dark hair girl’s sister to pick them up and drive them home. Now they’re in a fight for their lives.
The acting isn’t bad, it is fairly solid. The blonde girl is a bit annoying, but she is shitfaced so it kind of makes sense. Drunk girls drive me nuts so I guess she nailed that role. The clown aka Art the Clown doesn’t have any lines at all, he’s basically a mime. One bad actor is the guy at the pizza place that was cleaning up the bathroom, he’s just wooden ugh. The camera work is decent. Nothing too amazing to really talk about with the angles or transitions or really anything else. It does a competent job and isn’t distracting so I guess that’s a plus.
Special effects are the highlight of this movie. This is gory as hell. Gruesome deaths are abundant in this movie. A girl gets tied up by her feet then sawed through the crotch down to her head, that was so brutal. A guy gets stabbed through the top of skull then his head is sawed off with a coping saw, which is probably the most graphic kill in this movie with tons of gore and unsettling disgusting noises. There is a variety of weapons from knives to saws, hammers to guns and numerous other household items. This has to be one of the goriest and mean-spirited movies I’ve seen in a quite a while.
With all that covered…is Terrifier good? No, it isn’t. This was just boring and things just seemed to happen with no real reason. Not saying the lack of backstory is always bad, look at Night of the Living Dead, it had no backstory at all, shit just happens but the reason that worked is because the characters were established. Terrifier makes absolutely no attempt to establish characters. The dark-haired girl, who’s name escapes me…Tara? Well she is probably the most established character and she’s killed off, which was disappointing. The killer, I feel like this killer was a clown because you know all clowns are just scary. I hate killer clowns in movies, aside from Killer Klowns from Outer Space. I don’t get the love for evil clowns, they just fucking annoy me. Ooooh a scary evil clown, very original! Might as well through in a vampire and a werewolf while we are at it. The characters are so dumb, even by slasher movie standards. Lets stab the clown, then run away, lets knock the clown out and run away. Ok if I stabbed him once, I’d slit his throat and keep stabbing him until I was certain the fucker was dead. You deserve to die if you stab him in the back and stumble off. This movie is made for special effects, there is no substance to this whatsoever. It is a series of brutal kills linked together by a clown moving from point A to point B.
I can’t suggest this to anyone except people that love special effects. Hell I love special effects but I was so damn bored during this. Why can’t someone make a good slasher movie now? Oh its an homage to the 80s, WRONG! It didn’t feel like an 80s slasher at all, not even a shitty 80s slasher like The Prey. It felt like a straight up mid 2000s piece of shit you’d find at Blockbuster or Family Video in the cheap section. I give this an F. I’ll never watch it again and I’ll never understand why people like this dog turd.
