Last year I watched the anthology All Hallows’ Eve, which was director Damien Leone’s attempt to really push the Art the Clown character that he had been developing in short films for a few years before that point. Now I’ll be looking at the full franchise that has blossomed out of this idea and into a bloody phenomenon in horror. I’m really hoping there is something more to this than just gore but I’m not exactly holding my breath.

This is normally the part of these reviews where I would put a short spoiler free synopsis of the plot of the film before getting into my critique. Unfortunately, the “plot”, such as it is, isn’t really anything more than Art the Clown killing people. While there is technically a Final Girl in the film, she doesn’t actually show up to the action until well over half way through the run time so there isn’t really a character to say that you follow aside from Art. It would also be difficult to spoil anything in this since the closest thing to a plot point would be the manner in which Art ends up killing one of the several victims. So, yeah, the plot is that some drunk girls see a clown on Halloween and then that clown kills them and everyone else for about an hour and a half.

Astute readers might have been able to glean from my summary that I didn’t particularly care for this film. I’m not the type of horror movie enjoyer that wants to just see blood and guts on the screen for the sake of seeing it. I was extremely pleased when the backlash to the “torture porn” genre of horror in the early 2000’s made it so that we stopped seeing the rise of mindless gorefests like Hostel and the like. This, though, barely even makes a gesture at things like character and story. We don’t need to set up the why’s or what’s or how’s for our killer and we certainly don’t need to know anything about the stereotypes that he is going to be slicing up. Terrifier plays out more like someone’s special effects demo reel than an actual feature film. This is what you would show to prove that you could do the gore and blood for a real movie in order to get hired on.

The only thing that remotely saves this from being completely unwatchable is David Howard Thornton’s performance as Art the Clown. The physical work from him to make the otherwise entirely uninteresting silent murderer into an occasionally visually interesting or amusing character is impressive. His ability to take certain beats to give confused looks or angrily flip someone off makes you enjoy watching him be on screen. I would like to imagine that this is the reason that the franchise took off because anyone watching this movie thinking “I want more of this type of movie” and not “I want to give this good actor another chance with a better movie” is completely alien to me. I know that the goreheads exist that love this shit but I can’t understand actually enjoying something with so little to say.

I am deeply hoping that the sequels end up having something more to them than this because watching two more of these would be some serious bullshit.

Score: 1.5 out of 5