Scare Value Award Winner – Best Killer
Top 10 film of 2022
Terrifier 2 review.
Terrifier 2, the highly anticipated sequel to the cult hit Terrifier has arrived. Director Damien Leone brings a completely different sensibility and a boatload of ideas to a truly epic slasher movie.
New movie reviews will not contain spoilers
Terrifier 2
Directed by Damien Leone
Written by Damien Leone
Starring Lauren LaVera, Elliott Fullam and David Howard Thornton
Terrifier 2 Review
About halfway through Damien Leone’s Terrifier 2 it hit me what I was watching. This is Use Your Illusion. For those too young to remember, Guns’ N Roses burst on to the music scene in 1987 with a raw, classic hard rock album called Appetite for Destruction. In 1991 they released two albums simultaneously called Use Your Illusion 1 & 2. The raw do it yourself sound had been replaced by bigger production, epic tracks, a bigger sound and endless ambition. The original Terrifier has that gritty homemade raw talent feel of Appetite. Terrifier 2 is bathed in the excesses of Illusion.
Make no mistake, Damien Leone has authored an epic slasher movie. Fans of the original Terrifier may find themselves thinking they’re watching a story from an alternate universe. This has inherent pros and cons…but, like the Illusion albums…you’re going to get some new classics that make the whole thing worthwhile.
What keeps Terrifier 2 at least somewhat tethered to the world of the first movie is the triumphant return of Art the Clown. Leone makes bold choices in this second chapter, but Art still being Art in a remarkably different feeling movie allows him the freedom to experiment. David Howard Thornton returns as Art and is as interesting and maniacal as ever.
No scene in this sequel ever quite rises to the level of madness and memorable violence of…that scene…in the original, but Art has a full bag of tricks at his disposal. The kill scenes are as gruesome as they are great. While the movie wanders off in all kinds of different areas of Leone’s imagination, Art is always there…his trustworthy straightforward instrument of death.
Terrifier 2 is most interested in, however, its final girl. Sienna Shaw (Lauren LaVera) is the centerpiece of Leone’s epic tale. We wrote in our review of Terrifier that Leone and Thornton had created an iconic screen killer. LaVera is up to the challenge of creating an iconic final girl. Decked out in a badass homemade Halloween costume and covered in blood, Sienna strikes as memorable an image of the final girl as you are going to find in slasher films. There’s a point during a battle with Art where it feels like it turns into a monster movie. Good battling evil on that epic scale. LaVera provides the perfect counterweight to Art the Clown. Diametrically opposed entities that you can’t take your eyes off of.
This is all just scratching the surface of what Terrifier 2 is. Its (should be) too long for a slasher movie runtime is so stuffed with ideas that it can make your head spin. There’s dream sequences and destiny and a character who I can’t honestly tell you if they existed or not (or what the rules for them were if they did). There are ponderous exposition scenes in desperate need of an edit. There’s a magical sword. There’s a post credits scene that I’m not sure I even ever want an explanation to. But here’s the thing…it all works. It all combines into something that we’ve never seen before.
To see a slasher movie on this scale is something worth watching and celebrating. To see it in the sequel to one of the most effective minimalist slasher movies in modern times is astounding. This isn’t a knock off repeat cash in. This is a statement.
Slasher movies can work in any aesthetic, at any pace, with any amount of care put into their characters. Terrifier worked with one dank setting and underdeveloped characters. Terrifier 2 works in bright colors with fantastical elements and a fully realized lead. Critics of the genre often complain it’s the same thing over and over. Maybe Terrifier 2’s point is that a good slasher can work anywhere…even when doing the same thing over and over. They just need ideas bold enough to be interesting in between the gore.
Scare Value
Leone, Thornton and LaVera have made something unique. Terrifier 2 gives you all the things you want wrapped in a completely different package. There are flaws, yes, but they are interesting flaws created by hard swings. Did the world need the epic slasher movie? Yes. More than we probably realized. Let’s just hope it doesn’t take 17 years to see their Chinese Democracy.
4.5/5
Links
Streaming on Screambox later this year
