Terrifier (2018) Review

"What?  Did you think he was going to hack me up into little pieces or something?"

-Dawn

It's Halloween night and best friends Tara (Jenna Kanell) and Dawn (Catherine Corcoran) find themselves with a flat-tire.  They call Tara's sister, Victoria (Samantha Scaffidi), to pick them up, but soon all three girls find themselves in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with a psychotic killer, Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton), who is trying to rack up as many gruesome kills as he can before Halloween comes to an end.

What Works:

The best part of Terrifier is David Howard Thornton's performance as Art the Clown.  This guy is just incredible in the role, mixing a terrifying, unstoppable killer in the vein of Michael Meyers and the personality of Freddy Krueger, all without saying a word.  Art says all he needs to with his facial expressions and his miming.  His makeup and design are fantastic, but Thornton really sells this character as one of the most terrifying psycho killers to grace our screens.  I'd rather take on Pennywise than Art.

The whole movie has a very old-school slasher feel to it and that comes through mostly in the gore.  The effects are all practical and while some of them are wonderfully low-budget, most of them look fantastic.  It's some of the best gore I've seen since the Saw films.  The kills are all brutal and includes one of the single most horrible deaths I have ever seen in a horror movie.  Terrifier is not for the feint go heart, but if you love gore-fests, you need to check this one out.

The first half of this film is perfectly paced.  It's a bit of a slow-build as we see Tara and Dawn interact with Art for the first few time only for the movie to explode into insanity.  If this film was just the first half, it would be one of the best horror short films I have ever seen.

What Sucks:

On that note, let's talk about the second half of the film.  The film loses a lot of its energy when Victoria shows up.  She simply isn't an interesting character and the actress isn't great either.  The movie loses a lot of momentum at the halfway point and it's a bit of a slog to get to the end.  The run-time of Terrifier is 85 minutes and even that feels too long.

A few of the supporting actors aren't great either.  There are a few line deliveries and reactions that are just straight-up cringe-worthy.

Dawn is a really annoying character.  I get that she's drunk, but she's naive to the point of absurdity.  It gets really frustrating to watch Tara make all these fair points about Art and how nervous she is about him only to watch Dawn exacerbate the situation and completely invalidate her feelings.  She's kind of a garbage friend and I really wanted her to die.

The biggest problem of the movie is there are tons of frustrating character decisions.  There were way too many moments where one of the characters manages to injure Art by stabbing him or knocking him out, but than the character just runs away.  Seriously!  Double tap!  Once you get the killer on the ground take them out!  If it happened just once, I could probably get over it, but it happened like four times.  It was incredibly frustrating and made the movie far less enjoyable than it should have been.

Verdict:

Terrifier is a bit of throwback horror movie in terms of style and I love it for that.  The killer is amazing and the gore is some of the best I've ever seen.  The first half of the movie is simply incredible, but the second act throws the pacing all out of whack, the acting isn't great, some of the characters suck, and there are some incredibly frustrating character decisions.  This movie is on Netflix and it's worth checking out, I just wouldn't spend any money on it.

 6/10: Okay