Terrifier 3

Finally a clown wielding a weapon better than a red balloon? An utterly unique experience in a screening room for 1,380 people, horror fans to be precise, and with a delegation of the film's creators in attendance. But I wouldn’t give Terrifier 3 a higher rating even with knowledge of the preceding instalments. In terms of screenwriting and directing, the film is a retarded mix of Christmas splatter slasher and demonic fantasy motifs, with characters and dialogue that could have been written better by ChatGPT. In its brutality and indecency, however, it goes beyond many taboos, which is appreciated in devoted genre circles: perhaps more children than adults die in the film and Santa Clause himself meets his end in a particularly sadistic way. The scenes introducing the murderous freak have an appropriately disturbing charm, the killings are totally creative and the film has a likable 1980s visual patina. [Sitges FF] (05/10/2024)

Lovers of brutal gore splatter flicks will surely enjoy the bloody, darkly humorous orgies, but all of the film’s other elements are rather weak and Terrifier 3 doesn’t work well as a whole. I will overlook the utter lack of a story, the incoherence of the narrative and the seemingly random attempts to add depth to the not very coherent mythology, because those who go to see this film won’t bother with any of that, as they will be pleased solely with the over-the-top slaughter. However, that slaughter takes up only about twenty minutes spread out over the other hundred minutes of annoying dialogue ballast in which nothing more than the main characters’ traumas and the strengthening of the sisterly bond are discussed, at length and boringly. If the purpose of that was to make the viewer sympathise and bond with the characters, it unfortunately didn’t work. Whenever the psychopathic clown Art disappears from the screen, the film basically goes off the rails. The gore passages are quite spectacular and have verve (the opening prologue even successfully builds up the tension), but subjectively speaking, nothing here surpasses the cruelty and repulsiveness of the scene in the girl’s bedroom in Terrifier 2. (05/10/2024)