Review #254: Terrifier 2 (2022)

This review was originally written in October 2023.

Gabe's Horror Movie October Review #8 - Terrifier 2 (2022)

Man. Where to even begin talking about this movie?

I spent a lot of time praising the first Terrifier for how well it played up the slasher horror film subgenre, how it had taken basically everything you expect from a slasher film and cranked it up to the maximum level. That movie was tight, it was clear, it had a goal and it achieved that goal, for better and for worse.

Terrifier 2 is... I don't even know what Terrifier 2 is. It certainly isn't trying to do the same thing Terrifier did. It feels like the filmmakers decided they were done with slashers, and instead decided to go off in some completely new direction instead of doing what they knew they could do well. Is that a good thing? I honestly don't know. Maybe if I had never seen Terrifier I could have watched Terrifier 2 on its own and really enjoyed it. (Maybe.) But as it is, Terrifier 2 just feels like a bloated follow-up that lost sight of what made its predecessor good, and overstayed its welcome even before the halfway point.

Terrifier 2 (more or less) picks up a year after Terrifier, following a (high school?) student named Sienna, whose father recently died and her mother and younger brother are struggling just as she is. Her brother is obsessed with the clown murders of the previous year, and Sienna starts having weird dreams involving that same clown, who was believed to have killed himself after committing his grisly murders. Then a whole lot of nothing happens and the clown is back, but then the movie tries to shoehorn in some kind of subplot revolving around the idea that their dad was predicting the future and/or bestowed fantasy hero powers upon his daughter before he died? I think? And so Sienna uses her fantasy hero powers and a (magic?) sword her dad left her and she kills the clown. Except probably not, he's going to come back to life or something in Terrifier 3.

Look, I'm not against the idea that the clown is supernatural in some way; the beginning/end of the previous movie definitely implied that, and apparently the movie that was made before Terrifier also established that he was magic or something. That's not what bothers me. What bothers me is that SO MUCH TIME of this movie is devoted to this ill-explained subplot involving Sienna's father, that never gets explained enough for me to know what's going on, or why I should be interested in it. This movie is LONG- almost an hour longer than Terrifier- and yet I feel like most of its runtime could have been cut with no ill effects. I'm not exaggerating when I say I got bored watching this film, and the first time I looked at the clock to see how close I was to the end of the film, I was only FORTY-FIVE MINUTES IN. None of the new characters were compelling and I really didn't care about Sienna becoming a DnD character (which is shocking, because I feel like that should have been my absolute jam)- and that's a testament to how dull of characters her entire family were. Now, the previous movie's characters weren't anything interesting either- but that was the point. Terrifier kept having to introduce new characters every five minutes because if it didn't, they'd have run out of people for the clown to kill. This movie seemed to think its characters were strong enough to carry an entire 140-minute story, and I'm sorry, but they simply weren't.

The special effects were great. The film as a whole looked beautiful. There was some great slapstick and physical comedy from the clown's actor and some incredibly gory, disturbing kills. But I just couldn't be bothered to care about anything that happened on screen, and that's a big problem.

Overall Rating: 5/10 Boxes of Art Crispies

Terrifier Legacy: Apparently, they've already begun making Terrifier 3, and the director has stated that he may have enough extra material ready to justify making a Terrifier 4. Let's hope the next two films figure themselves out better than this one did!