Terrifier 3
Damien Leone, 2024,
We’ve reached the “am I the asshole” stage of my reproachful trudge through this franchise, as Terrifier 3 ostensibly comes ever closer to the sort of 1980s genre trash that’s always warmed my contaminated heart. Its Silent Night, Deadly Night homage is unmistakable, its anamorphic cinematography nails the era’s unpolished 35mm aesthetic, and its uninhibited gore gleefully actualizes what all those VHS boxes on my local West Coast Video’s horror shelves always promised but rarely delivered. On that last score, I’ve also seen comparisons drawn to the New French Extremity movement, whose copious viscera have spent many an hour expanding my mind and corrupting my soul. Nevertheless, Terrifier 3, like the rest of the series, is a bore.
The New French Extremity juxtapositions are misplaced, since many of the standouts from that movement—Irreversible, Trouble Every Day, Martyrs—are operating on a level well above Terrifier creator Damien Leone’s apparent comprehension. Even the movement’s pulpier entries like High Tension embody a bleak gravitas that makes the extravagant violence feel truly consequential in a way that Leone’s gross-out maximalism does not.
Terrifier 3 fails as an indulgent vehicle for cheap thrills, too; partly because its nostalgia is so transparent; partly because its afterthought mythology is wildly unsatisfying; and mainly because its villain, Art the Clown, who may as well have been born in a Gathering of the Juggalos wrestling ring, still just sucks.
Side note: I watched this on Peacock, which curiously felt that for a film whose camera lingers endlessly on a chainsaw separating a man from his most delicate anatomical possession, the most relevant content warnings were “sexual situations, coarse language.”
