What makes a Christmas movie, a Christmas movie? It has long been debated if classics like Die Hard is a Christmas movie. It is. And the same goes to The Nightmare Before Christmas, questioning if it is a Halloween movie or a Christmas movie. The answer, it’s both!
Now it is being asked of the goriest movie I’ve seen this month. Terrifier 3 steps away from Halloween and takes an adventure as a jolly Santa Claus.
This is so much a Christmas movie; I honestly think they should have held this back a few months and release it in December. I’d love to see how it does up against Nosferatu. What will do better an arthouse, up its own ass type of horror movie? Or an unapologetic gorefest?
We know how it did against Joker 2, a bore fest. Can I just take a moment and say how insane and unheard of it is for a splatter film, not only being shown in theaters, but beating out a 200-million-dollar studio movie like Joker? That is monumental, folks.
It still amazes me that a movie like Terrifier has caught on the way it has. It all has to do with Art the Clown. There’s just so much about him that you find fascinating. Silent like Michael Myers but damn expressive like Freddy.
The way Art can switch expressions on a dime is also so damn creepy. One minute he is so happy and overcome with joy, like meeting a mall Santa at a bar, to being dead serious with the hardest look on his face.
If I had any kind of complaint about this movie it would be the budget. This time they are working with 2 million, which is gigantic considering the budgets of the first and second movies. But part 2 made so much goddamn money, they could have bumped the budget up for part 3 to at least 5 million. Hell, seeing how much 3 is making at the box office, make the budget 10 million, damn it!
Take that extra money and add that to maybe building better sets. Some of the sets here look bad and pretty cheap. The mall clothing store had only two racks of clothes on it, with everything else bare.
The set to the bar, which is one of my favorite scenes in the film, also seemed cheap.
Are they not making anything on merch because they should be making a killing on Art the Clown shirts alone.
Enough about budget, how is the movie? Well, I loved it. The Terrifier films I’d never say are enjoyable fun, but Terrifier 3 is so much fun. I enjoyed the hell out of this movie. I don’t know if it’s because they moved Art out of Halloween and into Christmas, but something about this movie stands out from the other two entries.
It’s still just as over the top and gory as the other films, but this is much more streamlined, larger budget, shorter runtime and a much tighter, coherent plot.
The first film didn’t really have much of a plot that I could remember and part 2 had way too much plot. This time they managed to reach a perfect balance of plot and what we all came here to see, Art the Clown being a lovable sicko.
Here’s the thing about Art, you like him, you do. But you never root for him. You never want the people he kills to die; you never feel glee when it happens because when he kills it is the most graphic thing you’ll ever see outside a Japanese snuff horror film.
I mentioned this in the previous review for part 2 that Art sometimes just pulls out a gun and shoots you. It’s crazy that’s somehow groundbreaking, but can you ever imagine Jason or Michael Myers pulling out a Glock and shooting someone in the face?
Terrifier 3 takes place 5 years after the events of the second film. If you need a little reminder, you could read my review of it here: https://writetoreel.com/terrifier-2-fan-funded-fun
I won’t force you to do more homework, so I’ll give you the cliff notes of it. Art is back from the dead and is seeing a little girl dressed like him. It’s unclear who or what this little girl is and they never explain it, one of many mysteries left unanswered in part 2. I’d say all of the third act of that movie made very little sense to me.
However, we do get those questions answered in the third installment and it’s actually pretty simple. The little girl is actually a demon, using Art to kill for her, collecting souls.
From what I made of this revelation is, in the first film Art was just a human. A sicko serial killer, but still human, so when he is shot and killed at the end, he died and went to hell.
That’s when the demon, brings him back so he can kill some more. And to explain the asylum, the demon then possesses the survivor who managed to escape Art but was left hideously deformed and mutilated.
Once Art loses his head in part 2, she takes over the poor woman’s body and births Art a new noggin.
After that, the two find an old, abandoned house and sleep for 5 years, until getting woken up by a demolition crew, surveying the house.
I like to think them waking up on Christmas is completely happenstance, because there’s no real reason behind it. I would have liked a scene where Art discovers that it isn’t Halloween anymore but actually Christmas, sadly all we really get is that scene I mentioned earlier where he sees the mall Santa drinking a beer at the bar with Clint Howard.
You know what’s funny about Clint Howard? He was a child actor, one that was considered a pretty cute one too. Wow, puberty hit him hard with the ugly stick.
This bar scene is such a fun, it reminded me a bit of Leprechaun 3 when he goes to Las Vegas. For a moment you almost think that Art will hang out, make some friends and be on his way. But of course, nothing like that ever pans out.
After sitting on Santa’s lap and tasting alcohol for the first time, not only does he spit it back in Santa’s face but pisses on his lap for good measure. That’s when the happy expressive look on his face drops and you know everyone is about to die.
Back again is our badass heroine, Sienna. Her backstory is also explained more, as she is chosen by angels to be the counteractive force of good to defeat Art and the demon using him to kill.
Ever since defeating him the first time, she’s been in and out of mental hospitals for 5 years. Her brother Jonathan is also back and seems to be handling it a bit differently than she is, with him attending college and trying to have a normal life again.
Another complaint I have is they don’t do much with his character. With the bigger budget, I really wanted to see Art do more as well.
They tease Jonathan going to a frat party, in my head I’m thinking holy shit Art is going to slaughter a whole room of drunk college kids. But nothing comes of it.
Well, that’s not entirely true as it does lead to the top kill of the movie. Every Terrifier movie has one of these moments. Where it’s so gruesome and so long that it tests your tolerance. In the first film it was the hacksaw scene where the person got cut in half ass up.
In the second film it was when Art basically pulled this girl apart with his bare hands for like 10 minutes. This time Art has a chainsaw.
After eavesdropping on Jonathan’s roommate and his girlfriend talking about Art the Clown, he follows them to the showers where he puts his chainsaw in some unmentionables.
When Damien Leone, the creator of these movies, was talking about big studios wanting to jump aboard the Terrifier train, he rejected them all, claiming the first 5 minutes of the film would be enough to turn every studio off, demanding he change it.
The start of the film is basically a kind of self-contained short story. It doesn’t really relate to the movie other than it has Art dressed like Santa.
Basically, it’s just Art going from room to room with an ax and slaughtering the whole family, including the kids.
When it was revealed that this was set during Christmas, and after the teaser dropped, folks got up in arms about the potential of him slaughtering children. Here is the thing about Art, he doesn’t have a single line he won’t cross. There is zero moral code, it doesn’t matter if you’re good or bad or even a kid, Art is going to kill you if he feels like killing you.
Sienna is fresh out of the mental ward, staying with her aunt and her family, her husband Greg and their young daughter Gabbie who idolizes Sienna.
As they go shopping, Sienna sees a glimpse of Art in his Santa disguise.
She tells her brother Johnathon about it, but he isn’t so quick to believe her. Since Sienna has a history now of seeing things that aren’t really there like her dead friends.
We see what Art was up to in the mall, as he takes the place of a mall Santa who went on break.
Again, you question if Art might do something nice or something less evil than what he would normally do. I thought maybe he just handed out dead rats as presents, but nope. He gave them all bombs and watched as the kids blew up.
I’m starting to think this Santa ain’t too jolly.
After Sienna grabs the magical angel sword from the Terrifier amusement park, why she just left it there, I don’t know.
She wraps it and hides it under the Christmas tree when she overhears something in the kitchen. That’s when she is confronted with Art and Victoria, his demon lady love. She tries to get away, but Art knocks her out.
When Sienna awakes, she sees that her aunt has been strapped to a chair in front of her and a present is place between them.
Her aunt is led to believe it’s Gabbie’s eaten head in a rat cage, with Art cramming the rats down her aunt’s throat.
There’s a funny little moment here, when Art goes back and forth grabbing supplies, he just slaps Sienna on the back of the head as he passes.
It turns out, that wasn’t Gabbie’s head, but was in fact… I won’t say.
I will say though, the ending to this film I thought was way better than the ending in part 2. Sienna and Art have another all-out brawl. She managed to not only get one over on his demon lover but him as well, stabbing him in the chest with her magic sword.
When Sienna sends the demon back to hell, she inadvertently ends up grabbing Gabbie down with her. Which sets up for yet another sequel, I’m sure.
Though the real question is, do we stay with the Christmas spirit, or do we go back to Halloween? Is there another holiday Art the Clown can terrorize? Thanksgiving being the obvious choice. But that’s kind of already been taken.
Out of the three films, not counting the short films and the anthology horror movie All Hallows’ Eve, Terrifier 3 is the best hands down.
So, I proudly give Terrifier 3 a SEE IT!
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