In the wake of Terrifier 2 making some quite huge waves at the box office of late, I thought I’d go back and watch the original Terrifier. At this point I should point out that I’d attempted to watch this film before and I found it really stupid. So stupid I turned it off half an hour into it. Was I wrong? Should I go back and watch this again with a better frame of mind? Wether I should have given this another shot or not, I decided that I would. So here folks is my second attempt at Terrifier!
The Plot
The movie opens up with the sight of a horribly disfigured woman who was the victim of Art the Clown. She claims Art (the Clown that brutally attacked her) is dead. From the outset it’s clear this is a movie directed by gore fans. The movie opens with some top notch gore. After the intro the film centres in on a couple of girls who’ve been partying all night on halloween. They finish up the partying and it would appear a strange clown is following them. From the outset this is one of the most F–ked up looking clowns I’ve ever seen. The more adventerous of the girls decides to take a selfie with the clown after they end up at an all night diner. The owner of the diner (also disturbed by the clown) throws him out (As I would have done if I owned any sort of venue) of the diner. He then returns to violently kill the owner and his brother. Very brutal stuff.
As fate would have it the two girls have captured the clowns attention. Do the two attractive young girls manage to avoid getting brutally slain by Art the clown? Well, my dear reader you’ll have to watch the film to find out! As a film, Terrifier uses almost every cliche in the slasher horror genre. It’s a simple film. But the gore in this one is very satisfying. Satisfying enough, that one can get past the lack of production values. I’m not going to divulge the killings in this one, but rest assured its brutal. Good thing too, as there’s basically no plot. Any suprises in this film more or less lie in the killings. That said, it’s still better than any Troma films I’ve seen lately.
The Verdict
On this second attempt at the film I have to say I did enjoy this. I’m not going to go so far as to say this is a good film. It’s B grade as all hell. Leave your brains in another room for this one and just sit back and enjoy the gore. I have to say as the veteran of over 30 years of horror movies, this one still left me with a few scares and a very uneasy feeling. Not an easy task these days.
Production wise, this isn’t the greatest film. It feels a bit over saturated in parts. That’s a bit distracting. I think the viewer isn’t meant to go into this one overthinking things. To be fair to the film, It was probably never meant to get into the mainstream horror conciousness. After a couple of extremely limited budget short films featuring Art the Clown,, Terrifier director Damien Leone managed to vomit this one out on a measely $35k budget raised this through a crowd funding platform and spewed out this film. It then got a limited cinema / art house release and even got onto netflix (which is where I first attempted to watch it).
For more great horror movie reviews keep checking back regularly on https://www.gorenography.com on a regular basis!