Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
I said that the original sadistic freak show called "Terrifier" was the equivalent of 11 million pints of blood splattered across the screen. "Terrifier 2" is no different other than maybe it is more like 111 million pints this time around - call the Red Cross and donate all that blood. Just don't call Art the Clown.
"Terrifier 2" is more blood and gore and entrails served up to make the screen as reddishly violent as possible, so much so that it may as well have such scenes fade to red. Yes, that is how violent it is. The mutilations includes gouging and plucking eyes, removing beating hearts, stuffing mashed potatoes into blown-out-faces-with-a-shotgun, and relentless stabbings and disembowelments and decapitations and head-scalpings galore. One particularly vicious beating and stabbing lasts about 3 minutes and the poor mutilated girl is still not dead! Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) does the bloody deeds with a smile and a little of his "Oh, what did I just do?" demeanor makes it doubly disturbing...but never scary.
The story has Sienna Shaw (Lauren LaVera) as a young woman who has panic attacks and vivid nightmares but tries to stay strong. She lives with her tough-as-nails mother (Sarah Voigt) and her younger brother, Jonathan (Elliott Fullam), who has a predilection for serial killers and for Art the Clown. The film is set during Halloween and the little guy wants to dress up as Art the Clown, much to the understandable disapproval of Mom. Meanwhile, Sienna is developing her Xena-like bronze-plated costume yet, one night, it goes up in flames due to lit candles. Sienna's mother is quite upset after putting out the fire and yells at Sienna, though she claims she never lit the candles. Jonathan finds a dead possum with a couple of schoolmates, then later finds the dead animal in the hallway as Art the Clown and a Little Pale Girl throw it at him! Guess what happens? Jonathan is accused of vandalism! The Little Pale Girl is sometimes present and sometimes not, and though we might think it is a spectral entity - it might not be.
"Terrifier 2" drags on for 2 hours and 18 minutes with a poorly developed family dynamic dependent on screaming matches than anything else. Two of Sienna's friends, both of whom are shallowly set up for slaughter, are killed so viciously that you wonder why Art the Clown does what he does. He's a supernatural monster dressed in a black-and-white clown outfit with a little black top hat strung around his head. This figure is frightening all by itself, including the Little Pale Girl with occasionally yellow piercing eyes and a terrifying smile. Copious amounts of blood, gore and severed body parts camouflage any real story or rooting interest in any character. The purpose of a movie like this is to allegedly thrill you and scare you but it only manages in becoming an endurance test. For the rest of you, it might be a bloody good time. Or you might want to donate blood to the Red Cross after seeing it. Either way, good luck.
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