TERRIFIER...

With Halloween upon us, you owe it to yourself to meet Art the Clown.

As far as murderous clowns go, Art is sui generis. In Terrifier, the most recent bloodbath from director Damien Leone, Art is on a rampage that rivals his feature debut in All Hallows' Eve (2013). 

Here, Art slashes, chokes, and shoots his way across the splatterzone. He cuts off heads and sets them on fire; he slits a woman in half; he wallows in blood in ways we haven't seen since Herschell Gordon Lewis' Wizard of Gore. 

Yeah, he's a jerk.

Still, his utter remorselessness is what makes him so fascinating. Few maniacs have had so much fun while stomping a victim's face in.

Terrifier, in fact, could've been called Art The Clown Having a Good Time. 

This time, Art wanders into a pizza joint where he sees a couple of young ladies coming home from a costume party. One makes the mistake of taking a selfie with him. She winds up in his warehouse, hanging by the ankles.

The plot? There's not much of one. It's basically about people coming into Art's radar and being destroyed, defiled, and demolished.

Even a seasoned horror buff like me flinches at some of the violence here. But why? Is it because we don't think Art can possibly top himself, and then he does?

It's not that the gore is realistic. At one point Art decapitates a fellow and kicks his head across the floor; the head sounds hollow, like a volleyball. This, perhaps, is the secret to Leone's success. Other directors work hard to capture reality; he makes a case for obvious fakery. I think of the Grand Guignol in Paris during the 1800s. Audiences knew what they were seeing wasn't real, yet they kept that place in business for years.

In Art the Clown, Leone has created an entity of pure meanness. I think the fake heads and unreal blood are acceptable because Art's meanness is so tangible.

What I like best about Art the Clown is that he just merrily trots from one murder to the next. Other filmmakers might try to  give him a backstory, but frankly, I'm tired of hearing how sharks are angry because of global warming, or how the aliens want our DNA because our species might die out. All filmmakers can learn from Leone; just get to the good stuff and let 'er rip. 

Sadly, Leone is less assured when working with conventional plots and dialog. His recent Frankenstein Vs The Mummy was a talky dirge that was overlong by 20 minutes. He's better off in the smash and grab style of his Art the Clown movies. He directs these the way an evil six year-old might direct a film, one horrific tableau after another. 

Beyond the sickening violence, Terrifier benefits from the cinematography of George Steuber, a regular Leone collaborator who gives this movie the sheen of an old amusement park postcard, mingled with a 1970s Italian horror flick. For a movie that looks like it was shot in a bus station toilet, it's surprisingly artful. At times Leone frames Art so lovingly and carefully, you'd think he was Josef von Sternberg working with Marlene Dietrich.

At the center of this grim cartoon is  David Howard Thornton as the clown. He's the second actor to play Art (the character was first played by Mike Gianelli) and he's fine at portraying the clown's  goofy, masturbatory glee. 

Leone also toys with our expectations. At one point a woman caresses the clown's face and says, "Have you never felt a mother's love?" Art begins sucking his thumb and curls into a fetal position. Then he scalps her. With that, Leone gives us a tremendous treat; we are relieved to see Art show vulnerability, and then doubly relieved to see that he's still a monster. 

Leone's movies tend to appear at horror film festivals, and then go straight to DVD. The unbridled sadism is probably too much for mainstream distributors,  which is a shame. Leone has a fine director's eye and he can ratchet up the madness as few directors can.

Still, I don't know how much more Leone can do with Art the Clown. Maybe, after two movies, the character is used up. If so, that's fine. I loved this guy from the moment I saw him. I loved his jaunty little hat, his enormous clown shoes, and his nasty black lips. Mostly, I loved his ruthlessness. With Art, there's  no clowning around.