Terrifier (2018) Review

THE FOLLOWING REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS OF THE DISCUSSED FILM. READERS DISCRETION IS ADVISED.

It is one thing to say you got an idea on how violent a slasher flick can get, but then you haven't dabbled with Terrifier. 


PLOT


Inspired by a series of short films, the theatric feature shows a disfigured woman share her trauma of surviving a violent massacre a year prior. After her television interview, she attacks & mutilates reporter Monica Brown (Katie Maguire) for her cruel comments towards her to her boyfriend. The film then shows the said massacre that took place. On Halloween night, Tara Heyes and her friend Dawn who drunkenly leave a party. When stopping at a pizzeria, they encounter a man dressed as a clown who gets kicked out for smothering his feces in the bathroom walls with his alias 'ART'. When the girls leave shortly after, they find Dawn's tire slashed and with no spare left, Tara calls her sister Victoria to pick her up. As they wait, Tara uses a bathroom from a nearby building after being allowed in by the pest control worker Mike (Matt McCallister). Once done, she encounters a squatter dubbed the Cat Lady (Pooya Mohsenit) who believes a doll she owns is her real infant. Shortly after do she and Dawn get subdued by Art who had just killed the pizzeria owner Steve (Gino Cafarelli) and employee Ramone (Erick Zamora). When waking up, Tara is bound to a chair and Dawn is suspended upside down. Art takes pleasure to saw the latter in half, and shoot the former to death when she tries to escape. He then takes Cat Lady's 'baby', but hesitates to further act when she shows motherly compassion. When Victoria gets there, she finds Art already wearing Cat's Lady scalped skin as a mask. By the time she finds her sister's corpse, she gets struck by the clown with a cat o' nine tails who also decapitates Mike's co worker Will (Michael Leavy). Mike does intervene to knock him unconscious, which gives time to call 911, but the clown gets back up to kill him too. He then hits Victoria with a truck and mauls her face, but he shoots himself before the police can apprehend him. However, he is shown to survive his wounds after killing a medical examiner to escape. The film ends with the reveal that Victoria was the disfigured woman on the show, as she gets checked out of rehabilitation by her parents. 


THOUGHTS


Having seen what feels like an entirety of slasher flicks from Psycho to Hannibal, I really assumed I have seen the formula take action from top to bottom and can't see anything new from it. Before the 2020s gave a batch to prove me wrong, Writer/Director Damien Leone made it a personal mission to shock the world with a grotesque atrocity that feels impossible in making a decision to keep on watching or to look away. You know clowns can scare many whether or not you've seen IT, which is why eyebrows are raised the moment Art shows up. All the violence you see hits the standard of shock value you have to expect in a grindhouse atmosphere Leone's going for, which he seemingly does in the way he also edits and how he creates makeup effects to depict his vision. Nevertheless, the real scene stealer has to go to the main attraction you expect from slashers that is Art himself. David Howard Thornton goes all in with his precision & specificity as he has so much enthusiasm you'd expect from Freddy Krueger, but has dreadful silence like Jason Voorhees which is a combo you wouldn't expect from a killer clown until seeing it firsthand. Whatever the reason this guy does what he does, he sure knows how to be unique about his presence because it's not everyday you see a clown seesaw people and enjoy mutilation such as stabbing ankles before going for the head. Every second becomes nightmare fuel and it's not a surprise he's not easy to be taken down, thus paving the way for a bloody franchise. While this character has grown to be the popular antagonist, you can never go wrong with a final girl protagonist to root for, and you get just that with Victoria & Tara. Jenna Kannell sure gets the ground going in making the latter a skeptical lady, while Catherine Corcoran showed Dawn to be far too oblivious after all the fun she just had from the party. Both of them dying were such a surprise despite the feeling you should've seen them coming because they just happened to walk into trouble and visibly had no reason to deserve such a demise. Transition to Victoria who sure got the rough end of the stick by living with the memory of the pain wishing she was dead. Before that, we got to see Samantha Scaffidi is able to make it believable she was a strong willed who was just looking out for her sister and walked into a big trap nobody could've predicted when living in the slasher setting. Sadly, she didn't get a proper recovery by the sequel and since that implies the trail of blood gets darker, you can only hope at least can go unscathed. This movie is very creative on its own, but then I couldn't help noticing a few things that don't make much sense as I sat through it. For instance, like how is there no security outside the dressing room for Brown? Even if they don't expect Victoria to attack, you still gotta prepare for the worst. Also, I do feel like Mike should've just waited outside the bathroom for Tara's protection anyway because it's too important to keep your guard up on a holiday night. Ignore this, then you will forever be blown away with the unusual favorable chaos that is Terrifier. If slashers have been your jam, I don't know what's holding you up from checking this out already.