Terrifier

 2/4

Starring: Jenna Kannell, Samantha Scaffidi, David Howard Thornton, Catherine Corcoran

Not Rated (probable NC-17 for Strong Violence and Gore, and for Nudity)

To a large extent, the slasher genre was a continuous game of one-upmanship.  A contest between filmmakers to come up with gorier and more gruesome ways of killing people off.  Stabbings, mailings, impalements, you name it.  Blood was the currency for an entire film genre.

"Terrifier" is a love letter (or should that be "blood letter") to the z-grade slashers that dominated midnight drive-ins during the slasher craze.  It wears its low budget with pride, looks like a film made with income generated by the director's paper route, and dares the audience to make it to the end credits without throwing up.  The problem is that in crafting this bloody homage, writer/director Damien Leone has either forgotten or intentionally left out any reason to care about what is going on.

Tara (Kannell) and her friend Dawn (Corcoran) are on their way home from a night of Halloween partying.  They're both too drunk to drive, so they decide to get pizza and sober up.  That's where they meet someone in a bloody clown costume.  Dawn scoffs at him, but Tara is unnerved.  He's kicked out of the pizza joint before they leave, which further creeps out Tara.  Then they find a slashed tire and Victoria has to go inside a dilapidated building to pee.  That's then the night of hell begins.

Every movie needs something to engage the audience.  An interesting character, a cool premise, or an engaging story.  "Terrifier" has none of these things.  The characters are boring, there's no real atmosphere, and the plot is thin to the point of nonexistent.  It would be a lie to say that there is no tension (a creepy game of cat and mouse in a garage is worth mentioning) and the villain has some moments of demented glee, but even at 85 minutes, it becomes a trial to sit through by the halfway mark.

The acting is the biggest blemish on this film.  The cast members are too bad to be good and too good to be bad.  I could neither identify with them nor laugh at them.  As a result, I felt nothing for Tara, her sister Victoria (Scaffidi), Dawn or anyone else.  Only the villain, Art the Clown (Thornton), has something resembling a personality.  Actor David Howard Thornton once worked as a mime, and used that in his performance.  Perhaps that is why he finds the balance between humor and menace.  The makeup gives his expressions a lot of flexibility, so his personality is heightened even though he doesn't make a sound.  Even when someone sticks a rusty pike in his foot.  It's hard not to be impressed with that.

Damien Leone has made a film for a limited audience.  It has no mainstream appeal, and it was never intended to.  It was made for a very specific horror fan in mind, and anyone who doesn't appreciate this kind of thing should stay away.  Yet even on those narrow terms, the film doesn't work.  It's not truly scary, funny or even energetic.  It's really just a dead zone.

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