Horrorfest 2023: Terrifier 2

Terrifier 2

Written and directed by Damien Leone

Starring Lauren LaVera, Elliot Fullam, Sarah Voigt, Kailey Hyman, Casey Hartnett and David Howard Thornton

USA, 2022

Are the rumors true -- is TERRIFIER 2 really better than TERRIFIER?

Well, it is and it isn't.

It's better in the sense that there's more going on in the way of plot and character development. Instead of just getting bodies to hack 'n stack, we get a couple fairly sympathetic characters, a teenage sister and brother duo (Lauren LaVera and Elliot Fullam) who are adjusting to life after their father's tragic death. Right there, we've got one up on the original TERRIFIER as we can begin to care about Art the Clown's potential victims.

That's about where the improvements stop, though. All the other possible improvements are sort of backhanded -- like, the movie's more ambitious in the sense that it includes fantasy and dream sequences, but once those are included it opens the door to asking, "Why?" That's something we didn't have to ask with the first TERRIFIER which was just content to be what it was. I might sound like I'm trying to have my slasher cake and eat it too, here, but I guess what I'm trying to say is that my perfect TERRIFIER movie would be a hybrid of parts one and two -- it'd have the interesting characters of part two, and the no frills, straight-forward nature of part one.

I feel this way in no small part to the movie's ludicrous running time, which is two hours and eighteen minutes. That's far, far too long for a movie about a clown who murders people. And I say this with the realization that both previous versions of IT are also very long. You're all too long, movies. Stop it.

Part of the problem is that a large part of the run time is made up of elaborate torture and kill scenes. The first movie had one big torture/kill sequence that stole the movie, and was content with that. This one has multiple, one longer than the other, and it gets to the point where, when you get to the end of the movie, you know the last ones alive are gonna like... live... so you know all the "cool" parts are behind you, right? So why keep watching, especially if a quarter of your way through the third hour?

Still, at the center, we have a well designed and effective slasher villain in Art the Clown, who is still played to perfection by David Howard Thornton. So now the TERRIFIER series has two good things going for -- good heroes and good villains. Maybe part three will have a good story? And be less than two hours long?