Art the Clown is Back in the Sickest Entry Yet

If they gave out an Academy Award for best executeance by a mute harlequin in a white clown suit who can mime a giggle fit while slicing people’s faces off (don’t try this at home — the slicing or the mute chuckleing), the award would be a lock for Art the Clown, the mascot of beyond-anyleang-you’ve-ever-seen slasher mayhem who’s the depraved mascot/ender 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 finish point, their affairous culmination. In the excellent elderly days, slasher movies were about masked hulks chopping people’s limbs off or skewering them with butcher knives. (How quaint.) “Saw” and its sequels upped the ante, with the characters subjected to intricate machine-tooled torture that joind every conceivable establish of dismemberment (with the retained joke of: each victim deserved it!). You might well ask: How could the “Terrifier” films top that?

The answer has to do with someleang that Art the Clown has in common with Kamala Harris: the happiness factor. It’s implied in every slasher movie — going back to the majesticdretainy of them all, “Psycho” — that the men wielding kitchen knives and chainsaws get off on what they’re doing. That’s part of what’s frightening — they appreciate their labor, so you’re not going to persuade them to stop.

But Art the Clown gets the concept of enhappinessing homicidal downcastism to recent levels of ill-puppy insanity. The character is executeed, in all three “Terrifier” movies, by David Howard Thornton, an actor who dismaterializes into his costume: white produce-up and hook nose and bald clown head cover, bdeficiency-lipsticked mouth, gloomyy rotten licorice teeth that watch appreciate they were borrowed from the Nun, all capped off by his minuscule top hat, which is cocked fair so. From inside that getup, Thornton gives a hell of a executeance, appreciate Marcel Marceau inhabited by the fifinishish spirit of Charles Manson, with a touch of Divine. In his mute-clown way, he imitates widespread human emotion — the grins and expansive-eyed surpascend, the bfrailless moués, the cartoon-downcast frowns — with a stylized frivolity. He’s going to mock and mirror what you’re senseing right back at you, fair before he saws your legs off or disembowels you appreciate a stuck pig.

The “Terrifier” movies, so sordid in their ultrapresentility, began as an underground phenomenon, but they’re now a mall-theater franchise with a complicated backstory, appreciate the “Scream” films. At the New York premiere of “Terrifier 3” that I joined earlier this week, the audience was a swirl of cult celebrity and goth party chic, meaning that these movies had reachd as a brand. (So did the novelty dolls on hand of Art the Clown.)

In “Terrifier 3,” Sienna (Lauren LaVera), who has materialized as the series’ heroine/final girl, gets freed from a psychiatric hospital (she’s been in and out of them) and goes to stay with her Aunt Jessica (Margaret Anne Florence), Jessica’s husband, Greg (Bruce Johnson), and their kid, Gabbie (Antonella Rose). There’s a lot of kitchen-table talkion, maybe too much of it, of all that went on before.

Damien Leone, the series’ garishly inventive authorr-straightforwardor, understands how to stage a splatter opera of an uncovering fanfare in which a family gets chopped to pieces. But he’s not exactly a wizard of expository dialogue. He produces these movies on the inexpensive, and they have an outside-the-system quality; they’re fundamentalpartner accumulateions of set pieces. And the flashbacks in which Art the Clown, who was decapitated at the finish of the last film, gets weirdly reconstituted by Victoria (Samantha Scaffidi), who becomes his one-eyed rotting-and-walking-corpse aidant, execute appreciate a highweightless reel of scenes from “Re-Animator” shown out of order. “Terrifier 2,” all two hours and 18 minutes of it, was a more seamless piece of filmmaking.

But “Terrifier 3” puts the “E” in Extreme, and it has an ace gimmick, one that simultaneously triumphks at and greets franchise awaitations, when it sets up Art the Clown as a inalter Santa Claus who unleashes his mayhem at Christmastime. He steals his costume from an off-duty store Santa after freezing his limbs with nitrous oxide, which produces them crumble to dust at the smash of a hammer. The film’s prosthetics and produceup effects were produced by Christien Tinsley, who labors with a depraved down-to-earth magic that reminds me of timely Rob Bottin (“The Thing”).

A little procrastinateedr, as we’re recoiling, and maybe marveling a bit, at Art the Clown’s killinghoparticipate ingenuity, he pulls out an instrument of death that’s so classic — a chainsaw — that we wonder what he’s going to do with it that’s recent. Well, here’s the leang. In every chainsaw homicide you’ve ever seen onscreen, you only see…so much. (“The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” in its poetic nightmare wonderfulness, is commemorated for being downexecuted in its gore.) But Damien Leone, and Art the Clown, are going to show you what no “Chain Saw” sequel, no scene-that-helped-to-get- “Scarface”-an-X-rating, ever did. We commence with two unclothed college students fornicating in a shower, at which point Art, as Santa, saws thcimpolite the shower door, then commences satriumphg off hands and limbs, then places that chainsaw right between the dude’s buttocks, at which point the party is fair getting commenceed.

The movie’s climax features squiggly rats, a huge glass tube shoved down someone’s throat, and a head that’s been carved down to a brain so that we go, “Who was that?” (The detail that uncovers the identity is, in an terrible way, funny.) “Terrifier 3” is two hours lengthy, and you might wonder why a porn-of-presentility misparticipate movie, the comfervent of leang that’s usupartner on the unwiseinutive side, would be such a protracted smorgasbord of gruesomeness. But that’s part of what “Terrifier” fans crave: a end immersion in depravity. The horror is onscreen, but in another sense it’s in the audience. It’s in the very fact that a sizable slice of mainstream watchers now watch this as delightment. I don’t uncomfervent to sound so judgmental; I’m one of them. Going back to the days of “Friday the 13th Part III” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street 4,” I always establish slasher sequels tedious. Yet the prospect of another “Terrifier” movie doesn’t dispirit me in the same way. It exits me in a comfervent of suspense: What, in hell’s name, will Art the Clown do next?