As of this writing, Terrifier, the 2016 gorefest from filmmaker Damien Leone, has a critics/audience rating of 63% and 51% on Rotten Tomatoes. This flick is polarizing, and it really turned some people off.
A spinoff of a segment from Leone’s horror anthology film All Hallow’s Eve, Terrifier follows Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton), a mass murderer who sets his sights on a pair of young women who are wrapping up a night out on the town during Halloween.
Tara and Dawn (Jenna Kanell and Catherine Corcoran) are regular, everyday urban twenty-somethings who just want to drive home, but need to sober up a bit before one of them gets behind the wheel. It’s too bad for them, then, that Art the Clown happens to be out and about looking for some victims. Halloween is the perfect night for Art, as his creepy regalia isn’t out of place, although it garners a lot of side-eye.
After some preliminary stuff and a little fodder for the audience, the scene moves to an old warehouse/loft space, just big enough, with enough dark corners, for characters to get lost and twisted about. Tara and Dawn are soon joined by Tara’s sister, Victoria (Samantha Scaffidi), Mike the Exterminator (Matt McAllister), and Cat Lady (Pooya Mohseni), because no slasher flick has ever succeeded with only two potential victims for the bad guy to chase around.
Terrifier would be a boilerplate slasher flick, but it stands out in two ways. One is the gore. Terrifier was released unrated because there is no way the prudes at the Motion Picture Association would have tagged this flick with anything less than an NC-17 rating. This is one of those rare films where we get to see what an unshackled filmmaker can do. It turns 
out, a lot of people appreciate it when horror filmmakers show a little restraint, even when it’s imposed via censorship. Here at Missile Test, we feel gore is an essential part of the slasher subgenre of horror, especially when it’s unexpected (see the shotgun kill in Maniac). A surprising splatter shot can be one of the great shock moments of the horror experience. The gore in this movie seems more designed to be unsettling, rather than to jolt a viewer. In that, it succeeds. If a viewer is not into gore, though, Terrifier will be a difficult, if not a repellant, watch. That, more than anything else, is the cause of the middling tomato scores cited above. For the record, the gore was a little too much for me, proving the old axiom to always be careful what one wishes for. Again, though, it did succeed in its intent to disturb.
The other standout feature of Terrifier is Art the Clown. He’s just as much a polarizing factor as the gore. Love him or hate him, Art the Clown is a unique slasher villain, and Thornton did an excellent job portraying him. Thornton captured the uncanny ability of clowns to be both silly and threatening at the same time. The visual cues of the costume, especially the mask and teeth, give the game away, but before any blood is split there’s something about Art that makes other horror movie clowns feel tame by comparison.
According to the internet, so it must be true, Thornton has some background as a pantomime artist, and that informed his performance. Art is completely silent the entire film, never uttering so much as a squeak or a grunt, even when he is on the receiving end of some gruesome injury. Besides killing, Art gets off on perverting the whimsy of clowning, taunting his victims with cheap showmanship before he gets down to the serious business of killing them. He takes to his tasks with glee. There is no sense of rage or any burning purpose to what he does.
As for everything else, Terrifier doesn’t make much of a lasting impression. The photography, shot digitally, went too far with the Insta-style filters, to the point where some shots are far too blown out. Besides Thornton, the cast was able and professional, which is more than any viewer could ask in a film with such a paltry budget. And story? There isn’t one. There’s a framing device that tries, but ends up being nonsensical, and probably should have been cut from the movie. Everything about the movie hinges on how one responds to the gore, and to Art the Clown. Come for the gore, but stay for Art.