Didn’t see this one in the theaters, though it seems like a theater experience would have been the way to go. Nah, I rented this on Fandango (used to be Vudu, when it was owned by Walmart, now is Fandango-At-Home, because guess who bought it), ten bucks. Didn’t want to wait ’til the price was reasonable. I loved all the other entries in the franchise, and I also love that an independent splatter horror movie out-sold all the other, bigger guys. Kinda like Rocky (the first one, not the Mister T one), except imagine in this instance Rocky won the fight in the end.
Big splashy bloodbath, scary clown, bag full of rusty hardware, and a little more money this time around to spend on the production values. All in a 2-hour package that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Also, I’ll point out that normally by the third movie (official movie, in this case, there were others) it’s usually pretty terrible. In horror or otherwise. Think Godfather. Think Jaws. Think Star Wars. Think NOT Rocky, because the third was the Mister T sequel, and Mister T is badass. I recall Eli Roth telling an interviewer that he’d not do a three-entry horror movie, because the third entry always sucks. Case in point, Hostel III was Scott Spiegel, Roth wouldn’t do it. Went straight to video, then straight into the trash.
This wasn’t that. This was a pretty good movie. I think Damien Leone had some stuff figured out at this point. Made almost 90 million on a 2-million-dollar budget, highest-grossing unrated film ever made. It even out-sold Joker Part Follie A La Deux, or whatever thay call it, on their shared opening box office weekend. Imagine the weird kid who spent lunches playing D&D with the other weird kids in the corner, beat out the football captain for Homecoming King. It was that level of an upset. The entire industry thought that it would gross some 12 million at best. “It’s just a cheap indie exploitation movie, nothing to take as a credible financial threat.”
(fists in air) Weird kids rule!!!
That said, there was a lot of hype, they really put Art the Clown’s face out there everywhere, and by the time the fourth movie comes out (currently in production) it will have lost its “underdog” appeal. We’ll worry about that when it happens, for now let’s focus on this one.
So now Art the Clown is not just a weirdo in a clown suit that poops on walls and takes mime’tastic glee in destroying people’s body parts with rusty tools, but now he’s the incarnation of a demon that inhabits his once-decapitated corpse, and puts it back together to kill again at the behest of the chewed-up victim from the beginning of the first movie. It’s supposed to be far-fetched and silly, if you take this movie premise seriously at all you’ve missed the point. I found it better than the first one, which I found to be better than the second one. The second one really kinda dragged on in parts for me, it was 30 minutes too long in my opinion, and my opinion means nothing.
Art’s no-head corpse from the ending of the second movie is re-animated, kills a cop and wears his head on his shoulders, then meets up with chewed-up-face-girl, who is possessed by second-movie-little-weird-girl… and she gives birth to Art’s head, reattaches it to his body, then they go into hibernation in an old house for several years for “reasons.” Some demolition workers come into the old house to inspect it pre-kaboom and, whoops! Wake up the evil demon clown killer who then goes out for a little a rampaging.
Meanwhile, movie-number-two victims (weird girl and her eye-roller brother) are in the process of putting their broken lives back together after demon clown monster messed them up. Only to come to realize “Shit. THIS again.” Clownmonster is back. Big sister victim goes to meet up with little brother victim at college (the perfect institution for victims), and is immediately star-fuckered by a true crime podcaster who wants to know how awesome it must be to be a victim to a totes rad killer! Doesn’t go how she planned.
Art gets her, no worries. “Obnoxious Influencer” is up there in the list of popular murder movie victims.
Meanwhile-meanwhile, Art makes friends with a mall Santa, then kills him, then dresses up as mall Santa, goes to the mall, frightens children, then blows them all up with gift-wrapped bombs. “Oh noes! Kills children! ZOMG so edgelordy taboooo!” sez you. Yeah, always uncomfortable seeing children killed in movies, not a fan personally (I like children), but if you watched that scene in the first or second episode of HBO’s Dune series where a 12-year-old boy is murdered via being magically burned alive? Much more disturbing a scene.
He kills everyone, though, not just pretty women this time ’round. It’s a no-holds-barred Wrestlemania event in a horror movie package with Evil Santa on the package.
That’ in mind’s right, this is officially a Christmas movie. Take THAT, “Die Hard!”
Art and friend pursue and terrorize big sister and little brother, and everyone in their orbit. Big sister is apparently an angel with a magic sword because her dad drew comic books like that and I guess that’s how magic works. She fights Art with her magic angel sword and we’re left with a part-4 cliffhanger teaser.
Lot’s of gore and blood and guts and eyeballs and penises and entrails and crunchy choppy sounds and it get the desired response of making you uncomfortable with its next-level approach to presenting an almost slapstick level of graphic violence and gore. Ironically, this over-the-top approach makes the violence somewhat more approachable, like a big screen Gwar concert. Almost too extreme to be taken seriously, much less leave any emotional impact. I’d still not recommend it to anyone genuinely sensitive to this sort of thing… there were, of course, all the reports of people puking and fainting at screenings, I don’t know why those people would have gone to this movie in the first place, really. To everyone else I’ll admit the violence is extreme but not as bad as you might fear… but it’s still extreme. The story has some hook to it, and the killer has a childlike charm, but one that I don’t know will survive a fourth installment. Time will tell.
Mido was initially into it, when she thought I was recommending we watch “Tuna’fier Tree”… which I guess is a movie about a magic tree that turns everything into tuna. I told her that wasn’t a thing, trees don’t do that and no one ever suggested they do. She gave me that look of hers (which I can’t discern from the rest of her “looks,” as she has a bad case of resting you-don’t-impress-me face) and slept through the movie.
