CLOWN ALLEY
Main Cast: David Howard Thornton, Jenna Kannell
Director: Damien Leone
I would like to report that work was proceeding as hoped on Shuffle Along: The Walking Dead Musical but it is taking a good deal longer to find a corps de ballet of real zombies to give this piece the flair it deserves. The local supply appears to all be employed on various cable TV series which has led to my need to seek further afield. I of course spoke to my Haitian friends, but they could not recommend a stay in that country at the moment due to political unrest and most of the five-star resorts having been commandeered by various militias. Now I don’t mind hanging out with the boys in uniform, but I do like to have a certain ability to communicate with them in a language other than rudimentary sign. I have had a few misunderstandings that way in my day and there are just too many cell phone cameras around for me to wish to be caught in any sort of compromising position.
My friends at my favorite Haitian-Creole restaurant here in Manhattan have some connections with the Afro-Caribbean community in Brazil so I am off to Rio de Janeiro in the morning to see if I can turn up a few zombies whom we can get to NYC on work visas so we can go into rehearsal. I suppose we’ll have to find a zombie choreographer who is fluent in Portuguese or at least hire an interpreter. I wonder how pas de bourree translates. As an inspiration for the trip, I thought about putting on Flying Down to Rio and dancing the Carioca around my suite at the Ritz Carlton as I pack all of my Louis Vuitton valises, but I couldn’t find it easily available on any of my streaming channels. Instead, as it is October, I decided to try a horror flick. I had read in the headlines this morning that the indie film Terrifier 3 had bested all of the studio releases at the box office last week. I had never heard of the franchise, so I looked up the original Terrifier and gave it a go while artfully folding my chemises and tucking them away.
Terrifier is an ultra-low budget film from 2016 made for less than $50,000 by would be auteur Damien Leone. In the tradition of 80s slash and splatter films, he created a quasi-supernatural villain, Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) who runs riot hacking up nubile young women and imbecilic young men. Art had appeared in a couple of shorts played by another actor, but Mr. Leone finally thought he had the right character and mise en scene to hit the big time with a feature outing. What he whipped up isn’t bad, it’s just got about every horror cliché in the book embedded in it somewhere.
We’re somewhere in suburban New York. It’s Halloween. Two friends Dawn and Tara (Jenna Kannell and Catherine Corcoran), dressed as slutty skeleton and slutty scarecrow, are finishing their night on the town after a little too much to drink. At a neighborhood pizzeria, they run into a somewhat grim, silent, mildly deformed black and white clown, who woos them before being tossed out of the joint by the management for defiling the bathroom. The girls leave but the clown returns and massacres the pizza guys before following the girls, who decide they need to use the bathroom and persuade an exterminator to let them into a creepy old building that seems to be mainly a graveyard for abandoned cars. Art the Clown tracks them down, follows them in and the mayhem and the body count increases as extra exterminators and Tara’s sister Vicky (Samantha Scaffidi) also show up, not to mention the cat lady with the doll. The whole thing is set within a framing story involving a television interview that makes little sense, even with the final reveal. But nothing about the film makes much sense. There are plot holes galore.
The whole thing is an excuse for the practical special effects make-up department to do their thing with severed body parts, crushed heads, burning nostrils, hacksaws to uncomfortable places, gun shot wounds to the face, and all of the other things that a good slasher/splatter is supposed to do. Films like Terrifier live and die on the villain. A good villain begets a franchise (Michael Meyers, Jason, Freddy Kreuger). A bad villain lands the film in the three-dollar DVD bin at Pic n Save. Damien Leone’s creation, Art the Clown, is both good and bad. The good comes from the performance of David Howard Thornton. Art does not speak, but his physicality and body language and facial expressions despite extensive prosthetics keep us interested. He also invests Art with a sly sense of physical humor which keeps us from turning against him. The bad comes from a complete lack of motivation and a turn towards the supernatural that comes from nowhere and hasn’t been earned through anything that has come before.
Leone uses his mise en scene well enough. The decrepit building is appropriately eerie and he photographs things like stacks of old tires in menacing light. He does not, however, give the viewer a good sense of geography so it sometimes makes no sense when screaming girls run the way they do or find blocked doors where there were none earlier. As far as the screaming girls and the doofus guys, there are reasons why you’ve never heard of the actors before and likely won’t in the future.
If you’re planning on heading out to the cineplex this Halloween for a horror film and you see Terrifier 3 is playing, you need not watch Terrifier first as it doesn’t really give you any back story or raison d’etre. I’d only look this one up if you’re a completist.
Gratuitous Rats. Gratuitous upside-down breasts. Gratuitous feces on the walls. Gratuitous double mastectomy. Gratuitous tiny bicycle. Gratuitous scary looking doll. Gratuitous on-screen decapitation.
Looking for more horror movies this Halloween season? Head over to Horror Corner.
Originally from Seattle Washington, land of mist, coffee and flying salmon, Mrs. Norman Maine sprang to life, full grown like Athena, from Andy’s head during a difficult period of life shortly after his relocation to Alabama.
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