Terrifier (dir. Damien Leone, 2017)
Do you remember those few months of 2016 when America was besieged by evil clowns? It began in August of that year when a boy in Greenville, South Carolina, reported a pair of clowns trying to lure him into the woods, and then spread like a disease from there. By October, there were sightings of malevolent clowns everywhere, skulking in shadows, holding balloons and weapons, leering in greasepaint. Then, November came, and it was as if these hordes had never existed at all, like they were a nightmare you’d already forgotten upon being jolted awake in cold sweat.
As far as I can tell, there were never any clowns. At least there weren’t until the panic went nationwide and people started getting ideas. I know of no photographs that were not staged, even though by that point everyone in the country had a camera on them every moment of every day. It was just another thing that happened that year. The corpse flowers were all in bloom, every famous person you ever loved died, and killer clowns were around every corner. There was something ominous in the psychosphere that year, and it broke through into reality when the impossible election happened. There wasn’t a resurgence of evil clowns when the new adaptation of Stephen King’s IT came out in 2017, because they wouldn’t have been an aberration anymore.
Anyway, Terrifier is a film about a clown that kills people on Halloween. It’s terrible and mostly a mean-spirited exercise in senseless violence. The film’s one saving grace is that the clown is mute and thus we are spared all manner of jokes, japes, and buffoonery while he bisects a nude woman hanging like a side of beef from ceiling with a hacksaw. I can appreciate that most of the special effects were done practically, but the digital video photography and lighting is almost as unpleasant as the murders.
Avoid, avoid, avoid.
October 9, 2018
oliveresque 