In short: Terrifier 2 (2022)

I thought Damien Leone’s first Terrifier was a surprisingly great microbudget slasher that mixed pretty damn extreme gore with a clear love for the traditional slasher, some clever twists on traditional slasher tropes, and a great slasher in Art the Clown. Terrifier 2 is made with clearly slightly more money but still has the same indie ethos, and an intense love for the tradition.

This return of Art is full of fantastically created, grotesque and adorably vile gore gags, nods to the tradition of the slasher and twists to its formulas. It also has a surprisingly complex mythology and a clear interest in building the character of its final girl (Lauren LaVera) and her family to be more than just slasher fodder. From scene to scene, there are exemplary moments of blocking and framing intelligently on a budget; the film often looks strikingly good, with gore set pieces that are filmed with as much love and enthusiasm as has been put into the creation of the grimly funny gags themselves. All of this feels very much like an absolute labour of love, and I’m genuinely happy the film has become a bit of a success for Leone and his cohorts.

Yet Terrifier 2 also demonstrates some of the problems that come with a film done very much DIY and as a labour of love, where nobody is there to say “no” to the filmmakers, so they can indulge in whatever they want for how long they want. The film is full of darlings that needed to be killed (or in this context perhaps not killed?) and were instead turned into scenes that go on and on and on because the filmmakers were too much in love with them to cut them down to the actual meat of the matter. An early example is the first dream sequence, which goes on twice, thrice the time it needs to, and includes a whole bunch of details that are of no use to the movie at hand whatsoever, the sort of cool little ideas one should leave on the cutting room floor because they are weighing one’s film wrongly. All of this leads to an exhausting run time of 138 minutes for a movie that really should be a lean 108 or so, and makes many ideas that are inspired and awesome on paper just a bit tiresome.