Terrifier (2018)

A few years ago, Damian Leone came out with All Hallow's Eve, a movie about a sadistic clown named Art who really just got his rocks off murdering people for no reason. But the problem was that it was a trilogy of anthology films and didn't just have him killing in a straight line for almost 90 minutes. Now we have Terrifier, which fixes that problem as surely as a master carpenter could.

Director: Damian Leone

Starring: Jenna Kanell, David Howard Thornton, Samantha Scaffidi

IMDb

It's hardly the stuff of master poets. Two young women are drunk and decide to get a bite to eat before trying to drive home. But that's when they meet the guy in the black and white clown costume. He's quiet and smiles a big red bloody smile, and for some reason only the one girl is creeped out. The other one is having fun with it, and although she's supposedly drunk, she doesn't act like it. Just seems more like she's a big clown fan.

The clown kills a bunch of people in the pizza place, which you'd think would be a sort of Switzerland for killers – who doesn't love a pizza place? Fucking savages.

Then he's chasing people around in an abandoned apartment building for some reason. Did he just not have any other plans? I guess it's good that he can think on his feet. He's really quite versatile, using elaborate torture methods for some people and others he just hacks up with a knife. Once, he rides around a little tricycle like the doll from the Saw movies, which I guess is good, we all need cardio. I wonder if he just has some kind of miniature roulette wheel he uses to decide how he'll kill someone. There's certainly no character development, no motive, which is surely an essential thing for an 80s style slasher. I really think they missed an opportunity here to explore the true depth and morality of a killer like Art the Clown, to really dig into his psyche and explain his humanity, that of a man who dresses up in a clown costume and kills people.

Instead, we get a scene where he literally saws a woman in half. Oh well. Different strokes. If you could tell an artist how to create, then it wouldn't really be their art, after all.

The movie chugs along and mostly becomes a fairly cliché slasher. Every trope is used, and by “every trope,” I mean the movie constantly does that thing where they have a character who could help the main girl, but he can't hear for whatever reason, and then the clown kills him from behind as the main girl screams. They do that a lot.

The only real change is the one scene where this crazy delusional homeless woman, who's been walking around with a baby doll all movie, confronts Art and acts like a mother, cradling his head and soothing him. It almost seems like it's going somewhere – but he kills her, as we find out a few scenes later, and as far as I can see she had no positive effect on him. Boy, what a hard sell. Truly stubborn, like a lot of guys his age. It's the tragedy of what society does to men, rendering them incapable of showing feeling except for cutting up horrified murder victims.

At one point he even pulls out a gun and shoots someone. That's just funny to me. This guy with all his fucking knives and weirdo torture methods, and he just has a gun for backup. I hope the NRA is ready to defend this guy's 2nd Amendment rights. I wonder what it was like when he went in to buy the thing. Did he show up in full clown makeup and pull out his wallet and pay with a Visa card? What did the background check come back like? I mean, I'm sure every way he got that gun was totally legit. There's never any issue with that in this country.

Pretty much the rest of it is fairly stock. It ain't terrible, but at the same time, there's just so little imagination to it. It's all just a lot of gory kills like you've already seen. Oh yeah, except the one surviving girl, the sister of one of the other girls who died – try and keep up with me for this Shakespearean plot – gets her face eaten. This ties back to the beginning of the film, in which a snobby newscaster is interviewing her with her face all mangled, and then the disfigured girl tears out the newscaster's eyes. I gotta say this doesn't make much sense. Is the movie trying to say that having a disfigured face and being chased around by a clown for a few hours makes YOU a killer? How offensive to that extremely niche community.

Or maybe she was always a killer and that was a secret twist that even the movie couldn't be bothered showing us! OOOOOooooOOOOOOOooooh! Scary!

Image copyright of its original owner, I don't own it.

All Hallows Eve (2013)

All Hallows Eve is a 2013 horror movie that I had never heard of until I bought it at the Spooky Empire convention last year. I then watched it when I got home and it was one of the scariest fucking things I’ve ever seen. Here’s a review of it.

Director: Damian Leone

Starring: Katie McGuire, Mike Giannelli

IMDb

Co-written with Nathan.

This is a sick fucking movie, and I mean that in a literal sense… the thing is that it really doesn’t do anything terribly different from the generic horror movies you’ve seen a hundred times, but just does things in a more depraved manner. It’s an anthology story with a wrap-around about a babysitter watching two kids on Halloween night – you could easily get the impression it’s just a straight rip-off.

But then they find a weird unmarked video tape – not a DVD, a video tape, because I guess the sick perverts of this town are not up to date with things. Or maybe just every time you need a haunted media in a horror movie, it’s something old. A haunted iPod or DVD doesn’t have the same resonance. And a haunted mp3 file? Fucking forget it.

The tape has a bunch of shorter movies on it, which the babysitter, after some hemming and hawing that ultimately goes nowhere, agrees to let them watch. You’ll start to see how amazing that really is when you see the fucked up shit on these stories – though the kids keep claiming they’ve seen “much worse stuff” on the internet. I guess they’re busy scouring the Dark Web for snuff videos or something.

The first story is about a girl who is sitting alone in a train station when a clown approaches her, initially seeming annoying but harmless, like any weird asshole you see on a train. But then things get weird when he pulls out a syringe and sticks her with it, kidnapping her – right there, it’s already fucked up.

Is he medically licensed to do this?

She wakes up in a dungeon with two other women, all of them chained up by their necks. They wander around a bit, often hysterical – it’s weird how the main girl is suddenly brave and badass. Earlier, she was scared of a cockroach she saw.

Then they find what I can only describe as what conservatives think Planned Parenthood is:

"THIS is what's happening to YOUR WIVES AND DAUGHTERS when they even GO NEAR a Planned Parenthood!!!"

I guess it ends with the devil raping the main girl – surprise, happy ending! I’m glad that babysitter let these kids watch this…

To be fair, she does finally make them stop watching it. The little boy she’s babysitting throws a tantrum over it but eventually relents. Then she goes back and watches it by herself with a glass of wine – choosing this over Night of the Living Dead by the way. Yeah, I’d also choose a creepy random video someone slipped in a child’s Halloween bag that could be a real-life snuff torture movie over a horror classic. I understand her.

The next story is about a woman alone in a house at night, talking on the phone with her friend about her boyfriend, who randomly woke up in the middle of the night and painted a horrific nightmare painting that he doesn’t actually remember. I love how they just talk about this like it’s normal, never really spending much time on it. You know how those artists are! They’re fucking idiots, right? Just painting stuff they don’t remember…

Anyway, that’s not even really what this story is about – it’s actually about an alien that looks like a child’s drawing come to life stalking her in the dark. As silly as this thing looks, I have to admit, I actually find it pretty creepy to look at. It’s just…eerie.

Just something about that big face and those dead, expressionless eyes.

The boyfriend eventually gets on the phone and tells her to call the cops – but she’s a black woman, so justifiably, she’s afraid the cops will shoot her in her own house, and doesn’t call them.

Instead, the alien ends up dragging her away, probably just to throw her a party, I dunno, I'm naive and have never seen a horror movie. I’d say this probably goes on too long for its own good, but even then I still like it – there’s something dark and hopeless about this story that I don’t get from other, similar ones.

Finally we get the last story, and this is the one I was actively kind of avoiding watching again – it's the most gruesome and gross one by far. I haven't really had a reaction like that to a horror movie in, well, maybe ever, just to illustrate that.

It’s basically a pretty straightforward old horror tale of a young woman alone at night running into the killer clown from earlier. She stops at a gas station where she finds out from the one dude working there that a clown has shit and pissed all over the walls of his bathroom – you know, the old clown trick book in play. He gets run off, and the guy is trying to help the woman find her way back to the highway when he gets distracted by some loud noises. And really, aren't you guys tired of non-vegetarian clowns? I am. I sure fucking am.

End the mutilating of gas station attendants! Eat at your local vegan coffee shop!

From here it just gets more and more depraved – there’s a fairly routine chase scene made creepier by the rawness of it. I guess the gritty looking, grainy camera style adds to it. And it’s just super uncomfortable and bleak at every turn, moreso than your garden variety Friday the 13th ripoff or whatever. She gets into a car with a stranger passing by, which, if you don’t know, is always, 100% of the time a bad idea in a horror movie. And like clockwork, the clown drives up to them and pulls out a random gun and kills him:

The clown is a licensed member of the NRA. He believes in the second amendment.

I don’t even know what it is with this scene. It’s so bizarre it’s almost comical that this fucking clown is using a gun – but nah, it doesn’t quite hit comical and stays weirdly menacing instead.

Then the car crashes in a horribly violent manner, but that isn’t even the worst part – the worst is what happens next, which is really so awful that I'd call it up there with the worst things I've seen on film, how this story ends for her. It's fictional, yeah, and they don't dwell on it much, but the visual is disconcerting to say the least - and to say what it really is, it's fucking horrific shit.

Back in the real world – or the wrap-around story – the babysitter tries to turn off the video, but it won't turn off, instead showing a mirror image of the babysitter standing in the living room, but with the clown behind her in the reflection. This, if you remember, was why they had to discontinue VHS tapes. It just wasn't working out with all the demonic clowns appearing in people's rooms.

Then, I shit you not, the clown appears in real life and kills the two kids she was babysitting. Wow! I wonder what she's gonna tell their parents! This clown has really put her in a pickle!

I am limiting the things I censor on this blog to one per post... sorry.

And that's the movie. Dead kids! Happy Halloween!

I don't even know what to say here. It's a sick, demented fucking movie and one of the scariest I've ever seen. It's just the way everything is done in this – it all feels super helpless and deranged, and the tone is as if it was made by a real life psychopath who was filming things he'd really done. It can be silly, sure, but I think the silliness just accentuates how depraved it truly is, as everything has that diabolical, dark air to it even when you're giggling. Every second of this is uncomfortable as fuck and deeply disturbing.

I don't even really know if I like the movie. It's that fucked up. But it did work as a horror film - they're supposed to effect the viewer, which this one did. So I can at least say that much. It is an unavoidable thing once you've seen this film - it will stay with you.

So with that said, I recommend it if you want something to watch this Halloween.

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