I do not own, let alone clutch at, pearls. When done right, bad taste is the best taste.

The problem with Terrifier 3, the latest in the hyper-violent splatter/slasher franchise from Damien Leone, is not the gore. Don’t get me wrong, the warning should be clear: the faint of heart ought to steer clear of this one. The squishy, bloody, extreme to the limits of extreme violence is not what makes the Terrifier films objectionable; no, that is the main draw. It is the reason why a niche audience propelled the third entry to the number one spot at the domestic box office.

The gore of it all is just fine. In fact, it seems integral to Leone’s macabre vision of the modern slasher. Some would argue that the extremes of our contemporary media world, and the postmodern sensibilities that have desensitized spectators and created a distance between them and the horrors of the world, requires that a modern iteration of the slasher icon pull absolutely no punches (nor stabs, nor sawings, nor gunshots). Others would argue that the absurd lengths to which Leone will go for the sake of the kill harks back to the Grand Guignol theater. I would hazard to claim that both arguments could be true at once.

The problem with Terrifier 3 is that, from my view, it has entirely lost the plot. What was once terrifying has been reduced to gags bordering on the slapstick. The grand exaggerations of the Grand Guignol have been flattened to a runny tonal mess. The series’ previous entry (which is its apex) operated in an elevated arena of genre hybridity. The sheer brutality of the gore film was interspersed with genuine melodrama that centered on a young woman, Sienna (Laura LaVera), who becomes haunted both by the killer clown that Leone angles to be the next slasher icon and the grief of her deceased father. Sienna’s relationships with her mother and brother are strained, but there is a humanism to how the family nevertheless works to keep each other afloat. It is a humanism which is challenged by the pure nihilism of Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton).

This dialectical relationship between love and evil, humanism and nihilism, is balanced imperfectly by Leone in Terrifier 2. There is still something off key about the film juxtaposing emotional beats with shocking death. It doesn’t all come together in the end, but the film is admirable for attempting something.

Terrifier 3 yadda-yaddas through the melodrama in order to get to the next bloody, drawn-out set piece. Five years after the events of the previous film, Sienna is checked out of a psychiatric hospital and moves in with her aunt, uncle, and niece. Her brother, Jonathan (Elliott Fullam), attends a nearby college. It is a new setting without new family dynamics. Jonathan and Sienna’s roles are simply reversed, in that it is now Sienna trying to convince Jonathan that the threat of Art the Clown is real. And the newly added family members do not deepen a sense of family melodrama; they are clearly here to be mere obstacles in Art’s path of total destruction.

As with many horror movies before it, the film also goes for the holiday-themed gimmick. Set during the Christmas season, our mute killer eventually dons full Santa Claus gear and stalks a local shopping mall Santa display. It is a perfunctory element that allows the film to cut into an interesting trailer, but nothing more.

Leone’s ability to craft truly upsetting and tactile visual effects won’t be held under scrutiny here. There is a reason these films sell to a specific sect of the horror fanbase, and Leone’s craft is it. Not to mention that Leone grows as a visual filmmaker with each entry in the franchise. Terrifier 2 was a huge step up from the grimy, lo-fi first film. With Terrifier 3, Leone and DP George Steuber block and shoot set pieces exceedingly well. Even as the kills get redundant and overtly comedic in a way that hurts the film, the visual design of them remain top notch.

As for the redundancy and the comedy. These leave this two-hour film feeling as bloated and over-stuffed as the big sack of “toys” that Art trudges around with for half the film. There is something inherently unsettling about the incongruous conflation of a comedic clown performance with the depiction of brutal death. Incongruity can produce humor, but is also can produce discomfort.

The unfortunate reality with Terrifier 3 is that it intentionally goes for the comedy at the same time that it professes to show an evil so purely impure that it is literally inhuman. That balance may work for the adolescents cackling in the theater while Art brutally dismembers a random, innocent person (I get it; I also was once a teen horror fan). But it doesn’t work when the franchise has established certain goals and drives pertaining to this exact balance between light and dark, innocence and evil. I didn’t watch Terrifier 2 and think Leone was asking us to laugh along with Art’s pantomime. With this third film, I think it is the only way one could derive enjoyment from the brutality.

Having recently listened to an interview with Chris McGurk, the CEO of the film’s distributor, Cineverse, this new tone does appear to be an intentional creative/corporate choice. Not only does McGurk want Art the Clown to be the next Freddy Krueger on a marketing level, but he wants Art to act like Freddy Krueger, too. Just replace the crappy one-liners with a crappy mime routine. The selling point becomes gross-out comedy, but the truth is it’s not all that funny.

Terrifier 3: C-

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As always, thanks for reading!

—Alex Brannan (Letterboxd, Facebook)