Wednesday, January 29, 2025

The clown is down: Look, I get it, dude, the whole creepy silent mime gimmick? I mean, it's very effective—and the blood is a nice touch also


TERRIFIER 2

2022
Written and directed by Damien Leone

Spoilers: moderate (at least I don't think it's high)


If you'd seen it, you would've known that Damien Leone's Terrifier was a special filmyou might've hated it, but you would've had to respond to its ugly energy, one way or anotherbut it was not, right away, a hit.  When it finally secured a theatrical release in early 2018, it made less than half a million bucks, and while its ridiculously small budget necessarily made it "a financial success," that's simply not very many tickets; so, instead, it percolated through the horrorsphere, slowly metastasizing till it went sort of mainstream, and Terrifier 2 could come to be.  It was here, I think, that I heard about the new extreme horror franchise, though I didn't do anything with this information, nor did many others, for Terrifier 2 wasn't a big hit, either.  Yet a sequel grossing thirty-seven times what its predecessor did (even if it's only $15.7 million) and garnering even more attention is no mean feat, and in a sense Terrifier 2 did make itself mainstream.

Well, it's before us now, and perhaps it seems funny that I keep using words like "mainstream" to describe a movie that would plainly like you to talk about it in decidedly different terms, and which consensus has declared craaaay-zeee.  But the thing about Terrifier 2 is how much more of "a normal" it actually is, in comparison to Art the Clown's All Hallow's Eve-compiled short films, or to its immediate predecessor.  This is almost a disappointment.  The reputation of Terrifier 2 is such that you'd think you were heading into uncharted territory, the cheapjack one-off torture porn/slasher hybrid of the first having spawned a full-on unhinged epic saga, powered by a deranged series mythology and pursuing ideas beyond its genre's ken.


I acknowledge my own faultthe notion I'd gotten was that this franchise somehow did its A Nightmare On Elm Street 4: The Dream Master immediately.  Instead, it's pretty much just Halloween, and, even more specifically, Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, or at least it's difficult to imagine that Terrifier 2's Halloween shop sequence is not in direct conversation with Halloween 4's Halloween shop sequence, and while Halloween 4's isn't nearly as much fun, Halloween 4 also didn't allege that Halloween shops close at 3 p.m. on their busiest shopping day.  Now, there is one saliently odd thing about Terrifier 2: it is a gobsmacking 138 minutes.  If it were the longest slasher film ever made, then I assume people would say so, but that runtime certainly affords it the kind of indecently broad canvas a filmmaker would only choose if they were transcending the whole shebang.  Terrifier 2, as noted, doesn't.  It does the opposite, which after a fashion is weird, or the way it does it is: it looks like it has one of those "unhinged epic sagas," complete with the deranged series mythology (it does manage the deranged iconography), and it operates almost entirely beneath that canvas, almost wholly inaccessible to the characters.  There's a big swerve towards grandiosity in the end, from which Leonewhom we must now start thinking of as a legitimate veterangets all he could, but which also suggests that even his fivefold-expanded budget (still only $250,000) wasn't quite enough money to get all his ideas onscreen, not that he was ever going to give up those ideas, because, remember, the first Terrifier was only a tenuous, memetic success, and Leone could not be sure he'd ever get to make another one.

If that seems down on Terrifier 2, I should be clear: I am emphatically not.  It's a better movie than Terrifier on every metric except "what the absolute fuck" and if you're using Terrifier as your baseline for "what the absolute fuck," you won't find many movies that aren't disappointing, inasmuch as Terrifier 2 will still make you utter something like those words (or preverbal groans and yelps serving the same purpose) somewhere between a dozen and two dozen times.  (That fivefold-expanded budget wasn't wasted.)  There is only one real, genuine disappointment here, and an awful omission for a project such as this, and I don't know how it happened: Paul Wiley did the urgent and very-present score for Terrifier, and he returned for Terrifier 2, even joined by a colleague, Rostislav Vaynshtok, yet if that at all implies "twice the music of Terrifier," I honestly don't know if this film, almost twice the length of Terrifier, even has as much, and it's mixed lower, so that to the extent the movie has a scorethere are stretches where I was wondering if it still didit's often only underscoring more-or-less appropriate to the onscreen action, and its spikier efforts always peter out.  (The Midnight song they licensed is unaccountably at the level of a whisper.)  There are great slashers that survive not having great scores (this one does), but when a loud score, at least, was available, and when we're "doing a Halloween"when it feels like two of the animating influences besides John Carpenter are also musiciansit's a pain in the ass.


That concludes the dead-serious notes, and we still have a scenario to sketch out: one year after Terrifier, Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton), or at least Art the Clown's body, is still at large.  What's a mystery to everybody else has been solved for us by Terrifier's ending, where Art was already resurrected by a nebulous supernatural force, the ambassador of which is a psychic projection of a little Juggalo girl (Amelie McLain).  Presently, Terrifier 2 sees fit to provide a rather more, shall we say, detailed look at Art's first acts of post-resurrection mayhem.

I wouldn't mind praising every last beat of Thornton's performance, but I'll try to limit our discussions of all the numerous grace notes he's putting into the film to the first of them, not least because it's so representative.  So: in what might be the fourth shot of the movie, I believe only the second shot Thornton's in, and definitely the first where his pasty face is visible and he's not an 80s music video-backlit phantasm in an 80s music video decaying alleyway (Leone is doing some discontinuous editing here), Thornton is tasked with reacting to something happening at a 90 degree angle to him, and first he makes his eyes swivel hard to his left, while his actual head only follows a good half-second later, like those giant maniacal eyes are dragging his skull around by a chain; and the promise this gesture makes is that Thornton is going to be even more controlled and meticulous this time about being a pantomime clown who amuses himself and attempts to amuse the people around him by murdering them.  A minute later he'll be trying to replace his damaged right eye with the coroner's (Corey Duval's).


That
 gets across, possibly not as well as I'd like it to in text description, that Terrifier 2 is "funnier" than Terrifier (I'm not even sure scare quotes are required), and that many (not all, but possibly a majority) of its kill sequences have at least a pronounced comic element, which the film does not want you to be ashamed of laughing at.  This includes its very nastiest, or at least its denouement has one terrific punchline.  What's not representative about the coroner's death, however, is that there's a faint sense that about half of Art's victims could've avoided their fate by simply responding more positively to his clowning.  (For example, in that Halloween 4 costume shop sequence, despite Leone having designed a really upsetting and impressive cranial trauma makeup effect, the key part of it, to my mind, is Art being an annoying dork with stupid Halloween tchotchkes, especially a series of over-the-top novelty glasses.)  This is a departure from Terrifier in tenor, and both of these things (and they're not even the big thing) play their part in making Terrifier 2 feel a little less dangerous than its evil predecessor; although as far as all that gory humor goes, who can say, maybe it's more evil ("why's mine sticky?", says the unwitting child), and that's just Art's morally corrosive effect doing its work.

That big thing, though, which pretty much objectively distinguishes Terrifier 2's worldview from its predecessor's, is that this one has an actual heroine, not successive victims failing to live up to the name.  And thus we find high school student Sienna Shaw (Lauren LaVera), who's had a rough time of it lately, along with the rest of her family.  Her father died, her brother Jonathan (Elliott Fullam) is going slightly Columbine, according to his increasing interest in violence and, most recently, his desire to dress up like a certain mass-murderering clown for Halloween, and her mother Barbara (Sarah Voigt), between Jonathan and a shitty telework customer service job, can barely keep her wits about her.  Sienna and Jonathan aren't really so different, though, or at least they both have a fondness for cosplay.  She's lately put her energies into a costume of her own, based on a sketch her artist father made, indicating that her artist father might be Todd McFarlane, or Zack Snyder, a sexy battle angel number which she intends to wear on a Halloween night out with her friends Brooke (Kailey Hyman) and Allie (Casey Hartnett).  What she doesn't know, or what she cannot believe, is that there's a murderous clown afoot, but she should; Jonathan has his reasons to already predict the doom drawing down upon them, and given the dreams she's having (a not-so-dead-serious note I have is that I wish her TV clown show-themed nightmare were better at being a TV clown show), it's clear to us even if it's not clear to Sienna that some psychic power has connected the Shaw siblings to the killer.  Art realizes it, and ultimately, with Jonathan as bait, he traps Sienna at the old abandoned carnival.


Besides the clown-theming, that's, like, a lot of Halloween we've got here, and, again, particularly Halloween 4: killer from the past who meanders about in broad daylight in his garish accoutrements by virtue of the fact it is, indeed, literally Halloween, pursuing a high school girl who needs to protect a younger sibling, plus vaguely-defined psychic powers; and I'm at a slight loss to explain how it takes 138 minutes, a runtime that had me checking the progress bar a few times, not because it was "too long," but wondering how there was still an hour left to go when it looked like we were already heading into endgame.  To Leone's credit, this confusion is cooler than otherwise while you're watching it: Terrifier 2 doesn't feel "short," but it does feel almost the correct length*, and the answer to the question "how" is that there's just... more of it.  Longer, more involved kills; possibly more kills period, even when late 80s slashers were already getting to be bloodbaths by census count, yet never at this level of explicitness; a lot more time spent with the villain, thanks to a personality more ornamented than "murder machine"; and a Final Girl sequence that's about thirty minutes long, though let's hold off, because that's where the movie is tacking into the new, or at least making something novel out of the old.

It has more interstitial "slasher padding" scenes, too, but here Terrifier 2 improves tremendously on Terrifier: leaving aside Fullam, for let's give a child in a B-movie a break, this is a genuinely well-acted film, above and beyond Thornton.  There are weaker performancesVoigt can veer too far into her stereotype's brittlenessbut no actually weak ones.  And this despite being stereotypes: Hyman's playing a classical "sociopathic party bitch," but there's so much wiggle room for her performance that it's not the sum of her character.  Hartnett doesn't even have a stereotype, just a function ("giving LaVera someone besides Hyman to act against; dying"), but she spins her lines with enough idiosyncratic fussiness that she has a personality.  LaVera, for her part, is kind of great, biologically advantaged already with the eyes of a Disney Princess; but she's strong at the big beats (there's a moment, in the blackest depths of the Final Girl sequence, where exhausted Sienna impotently shields her brother with her body, that's simply heartwrenching), and good at all the little ones too (she's terrific at "chemically altered," simply as a matter of well-calibrated mechanics, before even getting to how an idyll in unfettered joy also rounds her character), and all over she's charting a solid arc of serving as fate's fool until, at last, she embraces it.  (Campbellianism is certainly one hell of a distinction from Terrifier: if you agree with me that slasher movies act to remind you that you will die, but maybe not today, Terrifier 2 is a return to the genre's most fundamental theme, after Terrifier had curdled that into "you might as well be already dead.")


All this more quotidian slasher drama asks for a less off-the-wall style, and Leone obliges with a movie that's still quite well-made (at worst there's the one badly-blocked conversation that made me realize that two people talking in a bedroom is, in its way, harder than a thrilling stalking scene), but initially quieter about it, with returning cinematographer George Strueber doing an alternate universe Halloween that feels like Leone apologizing for the ugly orange-and-teal color grading of the similarly-hued domestic spaces in All Hallows Eve with a better version of it.  The film retains Terrifier's fake grain and hazy texture, but doesn't go off the deep end, into the freakish color grading, until the right time.  We get blasted on occasion (the biggest kill has a sickly orange-pink glow), but it's only a thoroughgoing part of the movie in the final third, easing us into it with Sienna's party-hard night out (I do wish the costuming budget were bigger for this Halloween bash), which bleeds just perceptibly enough into the chintzy hell of the carnival's centerpiece attraction, itself a small triumph of production design, as if Leone found half a dozen mid-tier haunted houses, and simply put them all under the same roof with the magic of editing.**  As for all that a Terrifier promises, we get that at a steady and generous clip: nothing here exceeds the sagittal split from before, but it can get close, the two most involved ones here being some all-timers in their own right.  Allie's is the nearest equivalent to Terrifier's "the thing," a multi-part death-struggle that this time I'm sure must take three minutes before her face is fully destroyed, not just in horrified subjective time.  (Terrifier 2's gore may be a dash more cartoonish, intentionally or not: one stage of that death-struggle is a slit-open eyeball that does indeed immediately parse as a prosthetic, which in a moral sense might be an improvement, though it's still supremely gross and the caveat is I've got no Goddamn idea what that would "really" look like.)  Brooke gets it quicker, but it's the same territory of total destruction, with some truly sick, highly specific crunching noises in the soundscape, down-pitched to sell the caving in of a whole ribcage.  A guy gets his dick cut off (though I'm not thinking that gets us to equality after the first Terrifier, or even within this one).

What this is in service to is a movie I keep suggesting is a retreat, yet finds its way into outlandish strangeness anyway, this space that's half-Rob Zombie, half-Jim Steinman.  It entails a magic sword; it revolves entirely around the other central image of the film, that's not the dichromatic clown, Sienna in her final form of a winged valkyrie.  I have quibblesat some point that imagery needed the escalation a higher budget would have provided, at a minimum a giant fire to backlight her withbut it's evocative as anything, essentially pushing Terrifier 2 into a place of full-blown fantasy, and given that Leone's entire purpose seems to be making the ultimate slashers with his ultimate slasher villain, he now requires you to think of Sienna as the ultimate Final Girl, a fetish object who's still been the realest human in three movies, elevated to a symbol of virtually religious importance, just like her adversary before her (Art's climactic moment, accepting his role in the story with an eager smile, is beautiful).


I love this, so it slightly abrades me that there's a steadfast refusal to take it all the way.  For one thing, for a movie with such ready access to supernatural horror and psychohorror, it doesn't do enough with them; more importantly, there are some unmistakable implications this movie makes, and if we've been talking Halloween 4 we could just as easily talk Halloween II and for that matter The Empire Strikes Backand "implication" is where they stay, even though they're so unmistakable that you start expecting the characters to begin making inferences of their own.  I'm saying, obviously, what the movie keeps saying: "Art is her mentally-ill, 'dead' father, who in his lucidity, gave his daughter the means of his alter ego's destruction."  But maybe this caginess, albeit frustrating, even worksI've kept calling Terrifier 2 "normal" but it wants to see how "normal" works when you slam it into a franchise that, previously, had made every effort to strip the genre of everything except the grotesque nihilism.  Maybe I like that the literalism is left to the headcanon people, then; meanwhile, the emotion that Leone gets to tap into even without it is that of grand myth, a sensation that Leone's creation of Art made the creation of Sienna inevitable, a figure of destiny whose destiny was to be the last woman standing before the dragon, fashioned by their mutual maker and tasked to slay him, if she can.

Score: 9/10

*I wouldn't hesitate to cut the follow-up on Victoria (Samantha Scaffidi) from Terrifier, though I appreciate that Leone renovated her mutilation makeup design.
**This is, however, not remotely an "abandoned" carnival.  It's a minor thing, but are you kidding?

Reviews in this series
Terrifier (2018)
Terrifier 2 (2022)
Terrifier 3 (2024)

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