terrifier 2

It’s difficult to articulate what exactly Terrifier’s deal is. Damien Leone’s cult horror series is, if nothing else, a marvel of micro-budget moviemaking. The 2016 original (passable, but artlessly tissue-thin) was made for about fifty-grand, while its considerably more ambitious 2022 follow-up was still realized to the modest tune of just a quarter-million. What Leone and his team manage to accomplish production-wise on glorified duct tape and gum wrappers is rather remarkable… and gorehounds are no doubt attracted to the envelope-pushing brutality and emphasis on old-school practical effects. But Leone’s larger narrative ambitions - beyond basic slasher/splatter formula - remain elusive. For a film that’s so flagrantly zealous in scope (the runtime is a jaw-dropping 140 minutes), you’d think Terrifier 2 would be slightly more pointed in purpose. 

Series antagonist Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) returns to Miles County on Halloween night one year later and, for reasons only vaguely established, ends up on a collision course with intrepid teen Sienna (Lauren LaVera) and her younger brother Jonathan (Elliott Fullham). Art is some sort of demonic serial killer in clown form (Leone himself seems fuzzy on the exact details) who intersperses wanton cruelty with fitfully amusing miming/mugging - he falls somewhere on the spectrum between Pennywise and Rob Zombie’s Captain Spaulding. It’s not difficult to see why some roll their eyes at his shtick, as is the case with most modern attempts to will a neo slasher icon into reality… but there’s no denying the physical quality of Thornton’s portrayal. Visually, the character is an evocative presence, with his lanky frame and licorice-ringed mouth that feels as if it has twice as many teeth as it should (it’s hard not to love the miniature hat he wears at a cockeyed angle), even if he appears to exist for no purpose beyond unimaginative evil. Art - who never speaks, offering pure bodily expression instead - is the sort of villain who somehow feels both thrillingly unique and tiresomely one-note… which, perhaps, reflects the contradictory emotions of the series itself. 

The difference with the first Terrifier is that this time Leone actually provides Art with a worthy counterpart. In the hallowed pantheon of Final Girls, Lauren LaVera’s performance is an absolute juggernaut. The smartest move Leone makes is literalizing Sienna’s badassery; she spends the entire second half of the film dressed as a winged valkyrie, to frequently stunning visual effect (Leone flirts with a deeper mythology, with the siblings’ late father filling his sketchbook with images of Art and Sienna’s battle armor, as if he presaged their impending clash of good and evil… but this is never much more than a kernel of a kernel of an idea). But it would be deeply diminishing to imply LaVera’s triumph comes down to her ability to fill out an iron bustier - her performance has serious teeth. Fierce yet vulnerable, empathetic and emotionally relatable, she’s given a level of agency that horror heroines typically lack… they clap back in the final reel, but rarely with this level of uncaged fury. A literal blood-soaked, sword-wielding angel of vengeance by the climax, Sienna feels instantly iconic. And in a genre frequently slathered in ironic detachment, LaVera plays her with the utmost sincerity. It’s a star-making performance.  ​

Still, for all the bells and whistles, it’s hard to see Terrifier 2 as much more than a steroidal slasher. The film (borderline plotless) does little to justify its swollen length - it’s one of the more indulgently paced motion pictures in recent memory. The gore, while fabulously executed, frequently tries one’s patience (it’s the sort of film in which someone gets stabbed in the crotch while taking a leak, and Leone throws in a frenzy of additional blade thrusts in graphic close-up for good measure). The centerpiece of the film is Art’s systematic mutilation of Sienna’s best friend Allie and the sadism is so relentlessly over-the-top, it can’t even be categorized as shock value… it cuts straight to exhaustion (by the time Art prances back in with the bleach and table salt, you might be seriously questioning your life choices). Extreme horror or not, there’s something a bit desperate about this level of ostentatious barbarity, as if the film knows deep down it has no other arrows in its quiver to nock. And yet, Leone strikes the bullseye with the film’s stunning synth-pop score - augmented by tracks such as The Midnight’s The Equaliser (Not Alone) and IndiGhost’s Pastel Sunset - which power washes the film’s grubby grindhouse aesthetic and frequently elevates the production into rapturous dreamlike fantasy and surrealism. If it’s not already clear, Terrifier 2 elicits frustratingly mixed emotions. Certain elements are, frankly, too bitchin' to simply dismiss the film as scuzzy dross… and yet an abundance of it is, well - scuzzy dross. The end result is too much of an endurance test to warrant any sort of good-faith recommendation… and yet Leone’s sick spell proves difficult to shake.