Happy Christmas! With a mid-October cinema release slot, Damien Leone's third entry in the Terrifier series makes an obligatory nod to Halloween (when the first two movies took place) but is mostly set in the days before Christmas whilst moving forward five years, enabling the film-maker to juxtapose Art the Clown's bizarre atrocities with warm, cosy and familiar Christmas holiday settings, which the film does to good effect. The film wears its genre inspirations well, from 80s slasher franchises and Italian nightmare horrors to 2000s torture porn, and the film looks good on the big screen/widescreen, perhaps more interesting cinematically than the second film if not as tight narratively (and a shoehorned in mystical backstory that makes the Thorn storyline from Halloween 6 look plausible). The sound design and physical/make-up effects teams obviously had a ball, with sound effects foregrounded unpleasantly and gore effects that push the film to its limits, particularly the 'shower scene' from the trailer and the very lively finale showdown. Particular credit should be given to David Howard Thornton as Art The Clown, who gives another excellent performance of precise mime that makes the character work better than a lot of horror villains, with most of the other characters doing a decent melodramatic job of chewing the furniture. The Terrifier films are (definitely) not elevated horror but heightened horror, and as provocative indie slasher films, they deliver effectively enough.
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