Art the Clown is back in the sickest entry ever

If they gave an Oscar for best performance by a silent harlequin in a white clown costume who can imitate a fit of giggles while cutting other people's faces (don't try that at home – the cutting or the silent laughter), the award would awarded Be a lock for Art the Clown, the mascot of the over-the-top slasher mayhem that is the twisted mascot/killer of “Terrifier 3.”

Art the Clown is to Freddy, Jason and Michael Myers what the Sex Pistols were to the Who and the Stones: their punk end point, their scandalous climax. In the good old days, slasher movies were about masked Hulks chopping off people's limbs or impaling them with butcher knives. (How quaint.) “Saw” and its sequels upped the ante by subjecting characters to complex machine torture that included every form of dismemberment imaginable (with the added joke: every victim deserves it!). One might ask: How could the “Terrifier” films top this?

The answer has to do with something Art the Clown has in common with Kamala Harris: the joy factor. In every slasher film – right up to the granddaddy of them all, “Psycho” – it's implicit that the men with kitchen knives and chainsaws are doing what they do. That's part of what's scary – they like their work, so you're not going to convince them to stop.

But Art the Clown takes the concept from enjoy murderous sadism to new levels of sick puppy madness. The character is played in all three “Terrifier” films by David Howard Thornton, an actor who disappears into his costume: white makeup and hooked nose and bald clown headgear, mouth painted with black lipstick, dirty, rotten licorice teeth that look like they would have been borrowed from the nun, all topped with his tiny top hat that sits just so askew. From within, Thornton delivers one hell of a performance, like Marcel Marceau inhabited by the devilish spirit of Charles Manson, with a touch of the divine. In his quiet clown way, he mimics ordinary human emotions—the wide-eyed grin and surprise, the innocent expressions, the cartoon-sad frown—with a stylized frivolity. He will mock and mirror your feelings before sawing off your legs or slashing your stomach like a stuck pig.

The “Terrifier” films, so dirty in their ultraviolence, began as an underground phenomenon, but today they are a mall theater franchise with a complicated backstory, like the “Scream” films. At the New York premiere of “Terrifier 3,” which I attended earlier this week, the audience was a swirl of cult stars and gothic party chic, which meant these films had caught on as a brand. (This also applies to Art the Clown novelty dolls.)

In “Terrifier 3,” Sienna (Lauren LaVera), who has emerged as the heroine/final girl of the series, is released from a psychiatric hospital (she has been there on and off) and goes to live with her Aunt Jessica (Margaret Anne). Florence), Jessica's husband Greg (Bruce Johnson) and their daughter Gabbie (Antonella Rose). There's a lot of kitchen table discussion, perhaps too much of it, of everything that's happened before.

Damien Leone, the series' wildly imaginative writer and director, knows how to stage a splatter opera with an opening fanfare of a family being hacked to pieces. But he's not exactly a wizard of expository dialogue. He makes these films on the cheap, and they have a quality that's outside the system; They are basically collections of set pieces. And the flashbacks, in which Art the clown, decapitated at the end of the last film, is strangely restored by Victoria (Samantha Scaffidi), who becomes his one-eyed decaying and walking mortuary assistant, play out like climactic scenes “Re-Animator” shown out of order. “Terrifier 2,” all two hours and 18 minutes long, was a smoother piece of filmmaking.

But “Terrifier 3” puts the “E” on “Extreme” and has an ingenious gimmick that simultaneously fulfills the expectations of the franchise and winks by casting Art the Clown as a fake Santa Claus who unleashes his mayhem at Christmas time. He steals his costume from an off-duty Santa Claus after freezing his limbs with nitrous oxide, causing them to turn to dust when hit with a hammer. The film's prosthetics and makeup effects were created by Christien Tinsley, who works with a twisted practical magic that reminds me of early Rob Bottin (“The Thing”).

A little later, as we recoil and perhaps wonder a little about Art, the clown's ingenuity in the slaughterhouse, he pulls out such a classic instrument of death – a chainsaw – that we wonder what he's going to do with this new device. Well, here's the thing. With every chainsaw murder you've ever seen on screen, all you see is… this much. (“The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” in its poetic, nightmarish grandeur, is known for being restrained in its gore.) But Damien Leone and Art the Clown will show you what no “Chain Saw” sequel, no scene-stealer This helped “Scarface” get an X rating. We start with two naked college students fornicating in the shower. At this point, Art as Santa Claus saws open the shower door, then starts sawing off hands and limbs, and then sticks the chainsaw right between the guy's buttocks, and at this point the party is just getting started.

The film's climax features squiggly rats, a large glass tube shoved down someone's throat, and a head carved down to a brain, leaving us wondering, “Who was that?” (The detail that the Identity Revealed is horribly funny.) “Terrifier 3” is two hours long, and you might be wondering why a violent porn exploitation film would be such a thing, as it would normally be rather short , would be such a tedious smorgasbord of atrocities. But that's part of what “Terrifier” fans crave: a total immersion in depravity. The horror is on the screen, but in another sense it is in the audience. It's precisely the fact that a significant portion of mainstream viewers now view this as entertainment. I don't want to sound so judgmental; I am one of them. Going back to the days of Friday the 13th Part III and A Nightmare on Elm Street 4, I've always found slasher sequels boring. But the prospect of another “Terrifier” film doesn’t discourage me to the same extent. It leaves me in a kind of suspense: What the hell is Art the Clown going to do next?