Even for a slasher film, “Terrifier 3” is a brutally primitive entertainment, less a movie than a hostage situation. You sit in your theater seat and writer-director Damien Leone trots out his special effects for nearly 130 minutes. Leone has the good manners to honor the hype: the film is very violent. But the violence has little power—it is gory FX delivered without invention or variation.
Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) is killing people again, with the resurrected corpse of a victim, Victoria Heyes (Samantha Scaffidi), in tow as a co-conspirator in his theater of carnage. Victoria is authentically unnerving, and one of only two people in this movie permitted a personality. The idea of a victim becoming an ally to her tormenter suggests Stockholm’s Syndrome, and Scaffidi leans into that association.
The best scenes in “Terrifier 3,” the only moments that come close to recapturing the punk glory of “Terrifier 2,” are a few sequences early on with Art and Victoria squatting in an abandoned rat-infested house. Victoria eases into a bathtub filled with muck, and for once the grossness stings: you can feel the filth of that bathwater. The casualness with which Victoria then slits her wrists is chilling, as we are allowed to understand that she can’t die. She is in Hell.
Otherwise, this movie is a slow and random and boring and deadening parade of murder sequences and stiff conversations between extras waiting to star in the next butcher’s reel. I don’t know how Leone manages to stuff a plot-less film with over an hour’s worth of exposition, but damned if he doesn’t manage it. The ostensible point of “Terrifier 3” is Art’s rematch with Sienna (Lauren LaVera), who bested him in “Terrifier 2” and is the second of the two people permitted a personality here. But Art and Sienna don’t meet again, until the last 20 minutes of “Terrifier 3.” The rest is killing time.
To give you an idea of how inefficient this movie is, Leone spends many minutes resurrecting Art, then flashes forward five years, then resurrects him a second time. In God’s name, why? The movie makes no sense anyway, how about putting him where you need him to begin with? The people that Art kills here have no bearing on Sienna at all until late in the game. Even “Friday the 13th” movies are more fluid: the future victims usually more or less know each other, and we’re driven to wonder the order in which each of them will die. Very elemental, but this kind of narrative is ahead of “Terrifier 3.”
This film is set during the Christmas season, and, while some of Art’s hijinks are informed by the holiday, Leone’s script barely bothers to have fun with this well-worn slasher movie gimmick. It turns out that a man chopping someone to pieces in a Santa suit is about the same as a man chopping someone to pieces in a clown suit. A long scene between Art and a department store Santa in a bar has a bit of juice because the Santa is played by horror film veteran Daniel Roebuck, whose natural warmth prompts you to dread whatever’s about to happen to him. The punchline is typical but unusually garish.
This may sound strange to people who don’t like horror movies, people who presumably aren’t bothering to read this review to begin with, but the violence of “Terrifier 3” has no soul. The set pieces are works of mechanical prostitution. There’s no sense of the play or inventiveness or poetry or personality that often come with even mediocre horror movies. This dick head just chops people up, over and over and over. Sometimes, if even Leone senses the stultification of a scene, Art will cut into a body part that you don’t expect a film to have the cojones to show being cut. The intended coup de grace of “Terrifier 3” is a slaughter in a campus shower that, fans will know, is just a variation on something that happened in the first “Terrifier.”
“Terrifier 2” is more inventive than what we have here. Leone built scenes in that one, wild fantasy sequences that were laced with satire. Art was funny in that one, imbued by Thornton with an elaborate and creepy collection of physical tics. Leone has not expanded on that film’s promise, but regressed. This film’s good reviews are baffling, and I resent them when I think of horror directors, like Rob Zombie, who’ve been panned their entire career. Adding insult to injury, Leone rips off Zombie’s “The Devil’s Rejects” late in the game here, right before the inevitably incoherent set up for “4.”
By virtue of it being a real movie, Ali Abassi’s “The Apprentice” is more watchable than “Terrifier 3,” but both are one-trick ponies determined to assert the monstrousness of their protagonists. Set in 1980s-era New York City as it verges on gentrification, the film follows Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) as he learns the art of the deal from notorious lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong). When we first meet Trump, he feels eclipsed by father Fred (Martin Donovan), who is mired in lawsuits spurring from the racist practices of his slum apartments. Anticipating the city’s rejuvenation, Donald wants to build Trump Tower, though Fred’s baggage scares investors. Enter Cohn, famous shark and ally of Joseph McCarthy, who knows how to turn screws.
It is amusing at first to watch Trump learn the same lessons in hype that he would eventually use to consume the imagination of the country. But it gets old fast. Abassi has no idea how to dramatize the irony of Cohn, a bigoted and homophobic man who was closeted. Strong is vivid, but it’s a repetitive performance that pales in comparison to Al Pacino’s Cohn in the HBO adaptation of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America.” Kushner, a gay man who lived in New York at the height of the AIDS epidemic, had a nuanced and anguished perspective on Cohn’s hypocrisy, which he loathed and empathized with. Abassi’s sensibility is along the lines of “these guys, amirite?”
As Trump, Stan tries to play the man rather than the cartoon, but Gabriel Sherman’s script doesn’t give him much leeway. After a long first act, in which Cohn teaches Trump that reality and morality are contrivances, we skip act two altogether and fast-forward to the caricature, the guy with the weird hair and staccato speech pattern and propensity for constant lying that’s part calculation and part derangement. We get to hear Trump’s bit about how exercise depletes finite energy from the battery of the human body, among other things. My guess is that Trump wasn’t this Howard Hughes-ian in his 40s, but this film values Easter eggs over persuasiveness.
Because the filmmakers can’t dramatize for us the process of these men evolving, Cohn’s late-inning lapse into sentimentality feels laughably naïve coming from vipers at the top of the center of the capitalist world. Cohn is heartbroken when Trump gives him a fake ring as a gift, but wouldn’t it have been more original to have the bastard be pleased that his disciple has internalized his own ruthlessness so thoroughly? The problem with movies about rich people is that they are often framed from an outsider’s perspective, and the outsider usually imposes dull moralism onto the stories. Martin Scorsese, who is wealthy, and Leonardo DiCaprio, who is much wealthier, evaded this issue in “The Wolf of Wall Street.” That movie captures what we imagine to be the fabulous addictiveness of selfishness, whether it erodes us and our society or not. And, as such, the film captured how we can come to admire people like Donald Trump.
“The Apprentice” doesn’t understand the potential appeal of Trump’s charisma. His admirers say that Trump is telling the truth, even though he rarely does, because he mirrors for them what they believe to be a deeper truth: that everyone is out for themselves. He parrots their cynicism back to them as a fashion statement. Trump is saying, “Hey, I’m admitting what everyone knows and what the establishment can’t admit, which is that everything’s shit and that power is all that matters.” The low-rent banality of “Terrifier 3” plays to a similar impulse. Leone strips the horror film of everything but violence and implicitly says “feast my gluttons, on the raw manna of what you want: numb, oblivious aggression outside of the platitudes of studio productions.” It’s huckster nihilism that Trump could appreciate.
“Terrifier 3” and “The Apprentice” are both in theater everywhere.
