'Terrifier 3' Review: Silent Night, Unbearable Night

Other than the extreme blood, the last series of splatters has nothing to offer.

Adam Graham
| Detroit News Film Critic

Despite their most concerted efforts, no amount of blood or gore can fill the void at the center of “Terrifier 3,” the latest exercise in depravity in this horror franchise that seeks only to force bad taste – or any sense of bad taste. . I like it, in fact – to the extreme.

Writer, director, producer and editor Damien Leone sets this chapter of his series at Christmas, to check off another item on his naughty list. And within minutes the “Terrifier” series mascot, Art the Clown, is chopping children to pieces with his axe, just to show how far Leone is willing to go to shock the audience. What do you say, dear audience member? You are horrified yet?

Yet the only terrible thing about “Terrifier 3” — and the entire “Terrifier” series, which began with the 2016 original and continued with 2022’s agonizing “Terrifier 2” — is how uninteresting it all is and how little it’s in service of anything beyond your surface-level excitement. Rarely has so much bloodshed on screen been so lifeless.

It’s not Art the Clown’s fault. Actor David Howard Thornton, who has played the demented, axe-murdering, silent clown since the start of the series, brings a playful sense of insanity to the role. The art has become a bit smug, and Thornton’s imitated mannerisms and shocked reactions to his own bloodshed are the only redeeming aspect of the series. Without his facial expressions or fake laughter at his own actions, the “Terrifier” films would just be the bloodiest pages of Fangoria magazine, with nothing in between.

What’s worse is the total rigidity and lack of humanity in the scenes that don’t kill. The characters, besides being played by actors who act in a film, are not characters, they are simply containers for empty dialogues that stitch together the scenes between splash festivals. And there is no sense of levity in Leone’s world. It’s as subterranean, mean-spirited, depressing, and ugly a picture of life as you’re likely to find anywhere, and that’s not even when Art is cutting up bodies with a chainsaw and bathing in their innards.

The story picks up after the events of the second film, which left Sienna Shaw (Lauren LaVera) and her younger brother Jonathan (Elliot Fullam) dealing with the aftermath of their encounter with Art. Sienna decapitated Art in the last film, but that doesn’t really matters; Art’s mystical tradition has no comprehensible explanation – at one point he places another decapitated head on his own headless body and continues as if nothing had happened – because getting to the next bloody showcase is literally the just reason why these films exist.

And there are plenty of bloody displays on display, one involving an act of domestic terrorism in a Santa Claus window at a mall. Yes, haha? It would be unnecessarily alarmist to flag this film as some sort of symbol of society’s decay, as if this were a Congressional hearing from the 1980s, and the film does not deserve or earn that level of notoriety. But it seems to mark a low point in cinematic standards, a gore show with nothing on mind other than blood and how awesome it is. At least their shocking forebears from the late ’70s and early ’80s had a sense of ingenuity.

If there were a comment – any comment, literally about anything – at the heart of “Terrifier 3,” then its vile nature would be easier to swallow. But its sense of provocation is its only point, and it’s boring.

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