2 out of 5

Directed by: Damien Leone

Terrifier 2 was enough of an evolution from the preceding film – while carrying over many of its same flaws – that seeing where writer / director Damien Leone would take a third entry wasn’t a proposition without interest. But the bland cover for Terrifier 3 rather spelled something out for me that, unfortunately, became pretty true during its two hour runtime: instead of doing anything much new, we’ll just paint it a different color; now Art the Clown wears a santa suit.

That is, ultimately, what this threquel amounts to: much the same, except it’s Christmas.

On the plus side, Leone has once again clearly tried to take some feedback about his films precursor – 2’s lore overreach in this case – and correct it, which drops our runtime from 138 minutes to 125, and eschews much of the overserious claptrap of dragging dream sequences. At the same time, he’s maintained his strong work with actors and naturalistic dialogue; the returning final girl, Sienna (Lauren LaVera), and the aunt / uncle / niece she stays with after her stint in an asylum, all feel like real people.

But that doesn’t improve the general shallowness of the script, which really goes nowhere except the holiday move – including the opening flash forward to preview that santa hat and coat besuiting, which is utterly pointless except I guess to clue us in “gently” (i.e. not on camera) that kids are getting killed in this one – and a large chunk of that two hours is given over to a half-effective middleground of exploring Sienna’s PTSD / infamy and how others in her life respond to that, and having Art kill his way back to her. David Howard Thornton is, once again, absolutely fantastic as Art, fully sunken into the pantomime joker role, but my general criticism of Terrifier 3 is that Leone essentially tried to split the difference between the prior flicks, and for Art, that resulted in him having a mouthpiece via his now-sidekick Vicky (Samantha Scaffidi), who does the job of hypeman well and has great makeup, but feels like a confused way of tacking onto Art’s character: she gets to add in all the Freddie-esque puns and swears we don’t need.

Extend this balancing act across the board: I’ve mentioned how it has affected the storytelling, and that is also found in the tone, which just kind of waffles between goofy indulgence and an attempted Carpenter moodiness, doing neither strongly enough to be effective. Even the gore is impacted: while there are definitely impressive scenes, we’re back to the guts-stuffed mannequins of the first flick – goofy stuff – with some of the ridiculous inventiveness of the second, but almost curtailed via editing and the waffling tone to be… kinda humdrum. Not something I’d expect to say about Vicky’s knifeplay, or some exploratory rats, but here we are.

So instead of really moving things forward, or trying once more to expand the Terrifier-verse, Leone retreats a step to hang out somewhere between the preceding films. He’s absolutely grown as a filmmaker in terms of what’s in frame looking great, and being purposefully lit and edited, and the score is really fantastic, but instead of watching the flick with a kind of puzzled eagerness I’d previously experienced, I was mostly feeling dismissive – oh, I guess we’re doing this now, and with jingle bells on.