Gore Hounds of the world had all their prayers answered with these two movies......first. let's begin with....
Terrifier (2016)
Writer-director and makeup effects master Damian Leone gifted grindhouse fans with this over-the-top slash-o-rama guaranteed to make them drool into their jumbo popcorn buckets.(or maybe use the bucket to hurl into) Leone knew what audiences of such films demand......and supplied their needs with industrial strength quantities. --
The two key elements required for truly memorable gore-porn are well in place here.
#1. A demented killer, both frightening and somehow funny at the same time. David Howard Thornton, as the mute, murderously creepy Art The Clown fulfills this role superbly. Using his considerable skills as a mime, Thornton fashions a mad, mad hellish mash-up of Charlie Chaplin's 'Little Tramp' and Nightmare On Elm St's Freddy Krueger. And he makes Stephen King's Pennywise look like Ronald McDonald in comparison......
#2 The blood 'n guts......Both 'Terrifier' and 'Terrifier 2' are awash in ripped flesh, blood vessels emptying their contents like burst water mains, and human organs torn out of shrieking, agonized, still living victims. On a scale of 1 to 10? Forget it.....we're talkin' 125 or more .... Leone's own personally designed make-up effects look all too horribly real. You don't want to eat a full meal before watching.....
Let's not waste time discussing any storylines.......the only reason anyone would subject themselves to these films is to shout in joy at the sight of pretty teen girls and other random suckers getting eviscerated into butcher-shop leftovers by the ever jolly, devilish Art.
And Art, who so enjoys his work, goes about his business with grinning ferocity, even when he's enduring as much bloody punishment as he dishes out.
"Terrifier" adhered to the standard structure and length of a slash-fest....no more than a trim 85 minutes....it does what it set out to do, so BQ will bleed out 3 gory stars (***). Besides, who in their right mind could ever imagine a splatter movie longer that 85 minutes??
Damien Leone could. And 6 years later, he returned to unleash upon an unsuspecting world-
Terrifier 2 (2022) Leone's sequel follows an all too common path taken by many other film directors.... to their everlasting regret and sorrow.
Their egos fueled by success of their modest little film, they proceed to more or less remake the same film - only bigger, longer, and packed to the rafters with ten times the stuff everybody loved about the first film.
That's why Art The Clown's latest blood-soaked rampage clocks in at a brain-melting 138 minutes......yes, my fine fanboys and fangirls, this one's the 'Gone With The Wind' of gore-porn.
Art's back to tear out eyeballs and rip out intestines, but this time, for a change, the film gives him a worthy opponent in Lauren LeVara, a fetching martial arts athlete. And you'd better believe this kid's determined to be the Last Girl Standing, no clownin' around.......
Big problems abound here. Of course it's too damn long for a movie not interested in much more than human mutilation. Even worse, Leone's delusions of adequacy led him to fill up the movie with ridiculous fantasy-dream sequences, as if he woke up believing he's some kind of half-assed Federico Fellini. Lucky for him, he always has Art The Clown.....we can depend on ole Artie showing up to slice 'n dice somebody to the consistency of Philly Steak Sandwich meat, thereby making us forget this movie's a pretentious bore.
I'll leave you beloved BQ visitors to decide for yourselves whether the spectacularly grisly kill scenes make it worth suffering through all of the film's many chunks of self-indulgence. For me, it's a guilty pleasure, with very little pleasure 2 stars (**)
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