If they offered an Academy Award for finest efficiency by a quiet harlequin in a white clown match who can mime a laugh fit while slicing individuals’s faces off (do not attempt this in your home– the slicing or the quiet laughing), the award would be a lock for Art the Clown, the mascot of beyond-anything-you’ve-ever-seen slasher chaos who’s the base killer/ringleader of “Terrifier 3.”
Art the Clown is to Freddy and Jason and Michael Myers what the Sex Pistols were to the Who and the Stones: their punk end point, their outrageous conclusion. In the great old days, slasher films had to do with masked hulks slicing individuals’s limbs off or skewering them with butcher knives. (How charming.) “Saw” and its follows up upped the ante, with the characters subjected to elaborate machine-tooled abuse that included every possible type of dismemberment (with the included joke of: each victim deserved it!). You might well ask: How could the “Terrifier” movies leading that?
The response relates to something that Art the Clown shares with Kamala Harris: the pleasure aspect. It’s implicit in every slasher film– returning to the granddaddy of them all, “Psycho”– that the guys wielding kitchen area knives and chainsaws get off on what they’re doing. That’s part of what’s frightening– they like their work, so you’re not going to encourage them to stop.
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Art the Clown takes the principle of taking pleasure in bloodthirsty sadism to brand-new levels of sick-puppy madness. The character is played, in all 3 “Terrifier” motion pictures, by David Howard Thornton, a star who vanishes into his outfit: white makeup and hook nose and bald clown head cover, black-lipsticked mouth, filthy rotten licorice teeth that appear like they were obtained from the Nun, all topped off by his small stovepipe hat, which is cocked so. From inside that getup, Thornton offers a hell of an efficiency, like Marcel Marceau lived in by the spirit of Charles Manson, with a touch of Divine. In his silent-clown method, he mimics regular human feeling– the smiles and wide-eyed surprise, the innocent moués, the cartoon-sad frowns– with an elegant frivolity. He’s going to mock and mirror what you’re feeling right back at you, right before he saws your legs off or disembowels you like a stuck pig.
The “Terrifier” motion pictures, so sordid in their ultraviolence, started as an underground phenomenon, however they’re now a mall-theater franchise with a complex backstory, like the “Scream” movies. At the New York best of “Terrifier 3” that I went to previously today, the audience was a swirl of cult celeb and goth celebration elegant, representing that these movies had actually shown up as a brand name. (So did the novelty dolls on hand of Art the Clown.)
In “Terrifier 3,” Sienna Shaw (Lauren LaVera), who has actually become the series’ heroine/final woman, gets launched from a psychiatric healthcare facility (she’s remained in and out of them) and goes to stick with her Aunt Jessica (Margaret Anne Florence),