i'm going to become damien leone's terrifier 3

it has occurred to me that the tendency of this blog, just of late, has been to eschew three stars fine standards of the mid-to-late aughts in favour of brand new embarrassments like trap, longlegs and alien: romulus (2024 all). if this constitutes a kind of false advertising, i can really only apologise. the problem, i think, is that there is a lot of garbage about, just at present, and garbage qua garbage is the thing that has always most compelled me to write, even if that is not, and never has been, the stated intention of this substack qua substack. even so, i thought it might be a nice change of pace for you all today if i took some time out from my longrunning impersonation of that time kermode tried to review sex and the city 2 and ended up singing the internationale and instead talked about something i really loved for a change. i did wonder whether the substance (2024)* might be the appropriate conduit for this intention, being as it is by all accounts a movie absolutely ill with atmosphere, loopy with practical effects and centrally concerned with what happens if your teeth and ears fall out and you become a cataclysmic moaning boob monster, career-wise. it seemed like a good enough shout, because i like movies about weird serums and questionable medical practices, and i like margaret qualley, and i like the idea that ordinary people are going out to see insane squelching body horror in incredible numbers, and one has to imagine that that in itself would be more than enough to wrangle a substack out of.

so anyway, here's damien leone's terrifier 3.

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the fact that the movie currently topping the us cinema box office is a clown movie, but not that clown movie, is the kind of impeccable 30 rock joke that has made me believe, however fleetingly, in the abstract good in people. likewise, the fact that PG-rated action/adventure vehicle the wild robot (2024) has been given a tangible box office assist because children have been purchasing tickets but then sneaking into screenings of terrifier 3 (2024) is by far and away the funniest news story i have seen in a year notably bereft of them. what i mean by this is that terrifier 3 - a movie in which mute psychopathic chaplin-coded machete-fancier art the clown sticks a chainsaw up someone's bum, at christmas - is by some distance the most delightful movie i have seen at the cinema in some not inconsiderable time. what i mean by this is that art the clown is real, and he is my friend. 

i go to see terrifier 3 with my friends at 9.15 on a tuesday evening, having been awake since 6.45, at work since 9 and generally quite mentally ill in the twelve hours that immediately followed. by 9pm, i am thinking that i would very much be up for going home, were it not for the fact that i've said i'll go out, and also that i am - and always have been - pathologically down to clown in a way which has, lest we forget, led me to consensually view the movie it chapter two (2019) seven times at the cinema at some dark former point in my life. i think you should go, my wife says as i speed between commitments in central london, i think the clown will help you. she is a wise woman, if fundamentally flawed in a way that does not permit tuesday night viewings of movies where clowns eat people's faces, and i like her so much.

the fact that the screening in our cinema of choice is preceded by a trailer for wicked: the untold story of the witches of oz: part one: full throttle (2024), disturbs me not a little, but i push through. my friend alison does a bit where she explains all the trailers to me as if i have never seen a movie before, and i enjoy that very much. it occurs to me briefly that i have never actually seen a terrifier movie in the cinema, having watched the first one on my sofa, on a sunday afternoon, in the daylight, and i wonder in that way you sometimes do before a horror movie whether i might have made an error in judgement. 

then the movie starts. it is christmas and a little girl wakes her mother up because she can hear something on the roof. it's probably one of santa's elves, her mother tells her, coming to make sure everything's ready for santa. the mother goes to leave out some milk and cookies for said elf, notices the front door has been left unlatched, latches it, and goes back to bed. a little while passes. the little girl hears another noise. she goes downstairs, excited to encounter santa. santa turns around, and we discover that it is - of course - art the clown, dressed as santa, getting ready to hack up everyone the little girl has ever loved with a massive axe. my friend eliza leans over to me. ah, what's he like, she says. 

we love the clown so much.

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the reason terrifier 3 works so well, of course, is because of the artful conflation of demented gore and physical comedy that was always in evidence in terrifers 1 and 2 but actually seems to have come together, this time, with something resembling the instincts of actual filmmaking. it's a good movie, which is pretty weird to see if you've already sat through the earlier instalments. the fact, too, that the central performance by david howard thornton is the kind of dementedly inspired physical acting work that makes me think about the fact that joaquin phoenix won an oscar for joker (2019) and clowns who actually go out there and get the job done win jack shit, should not go unnoted. 

aside from this, however, i think a large part of what really makes this movie so good is all the things it feels empowered to do purely by virtue of being an unrated indie about what happens when you're a clown and you want to spray people with liquid nitrogen and then chisel their beards from their faces. it's a movie that involves, in no particular order: chainsaw murder; someone swallowing rats; explicit and unsubtle jesus imagery; unfocused commentary on the true crime genre that it can't really be arsed to argue through; a dream-orc being commanded by a sentient madonna figurine to smelt magical armour in hell; a clown getting overexcited at the prospect of meeting santa; a mall explosion; a possessed woman giving birth to a dismembered head; the true spirit of christmas; a big bath of blood; and an extended sequence where someone's dad is tempted out of the misogynistic cesspits of early nineties cartoon culture and persuaded to draw a picture of xena warrior princess instead. it is a movie which has been so empowered by its previous successes that it now gives over lots of time to indulgent fantasy lore, and that lore mostly works and is interesting. it is a movie where the script is so by-the-numbers that at one point someone says "i don't know what you're going through. i can't pretend to know. but i promise you it will get better", and it doesn't even matter. it is a movie that reassures me, with a fair degree of certainty, that terrifier 4 will not involve art the clown reflectively crooning standards of the great american songbook alongside dua lipa, and i'm not sure there's much more we can hope for in this day and age.

it's a great film, idk. i hope you have a good day.

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*a note from my wife on substack also-ran, the substance: "i don't really have much to say about the substance, which i mainly thought was dumb, but i do want to share my experience of watching it at frightfest, which was preceded by the spectacle of a man in a sequinned jacket sitting at an organ playing a sort of baroque variation on the title song from the phantom of the opera for about ten minutes until it was time for the movie to start, at which point, he and his organ sank into the substage of the odeon luxe leicester square, accompanied by an enormous volume of dry ice. and then the director of frightfest and coralie fargeat came onstage and did an introduction, where they did not allude to this happening at all. i have been thinking about this for the past six weeks."

this substack is committed to sharing women's stories. i don't know.