Terrifier

 Terrifier's a nasty, no-nonsense slasher with gruesome, drawn-out kills. Running a lean eighty-four minutes, there's just enough scene setting for the cat and mouse games that will ensue as two friends and a handful of bystanders are stranded in an abandoned building with a killer clown, to be picked off one by one.

 Besides the uncompromising tone and excellent gore effects, the movie has a not-so-hidden ace in its villain Art the (killer) clown (David Howard Thonton). Writer/director Damien Leone reused him from his earlier anthology movie All Hallows Eve (an equally nasty and fun compilation of stories assembled from earlier shorts tied off with a wrapper story, released back in 2013), and he's a great psycho: distinctive, assholish, and channeling that mime energy in a way that's eminently punchable; Very memorable.

 First introduced here applying clownface and working on his implements of torture (in a very 2000s-style horror scene, complete with alternative-rock soundtrack), Art never utters a word, choosing to communicate by mugging, pantomime, and stabbing. He toys with people, annoying and pushing buttons with lame humor before the knives come out... just an all-round hateful piece of shit. 

 Art the Clown is of a piece with a dark, comedic energy that runs throughout Terrifier, and helps keep it separate from the more joyless extreme horror movies of the last couple of decades. The kills are very gruesome and at least one of them, a bit of heavily sexualized violence, gets pretty uncomfortable, but they're also ridiculously over the top and Art's constant mugging helps keep a distance. Things are unpleasant enough to give this unapologetic horror movie a healthy dose of queasiness, but they also don't really feel like a wallow though misery - more like an accomplished team of craftsmen showing some justified pride in the work they've accomplished with latex and red food coloring; If they can gross you out, all the better.

 Terrifier feels doomed to be praised with qualifiers (it's good for what it is!) mainly because despite some agreeable weirdness, the story doesn't really surprise at any point - it saves all of its energy for its inventive death scenes. The script does a better job than expected of balancing the carnage with some tension building, reversals and narrow escapes, but the two-dimensional characters coupled with game but sometimes amateurish performances don't really get you to invest in anyone's fate.
 The low-budget friendly derelict building in which the bulk of the movie is set isn't that interesting to look at either, and there's no clear sense of geography to it; characters just run into each other (or the remains thereof) seemingly at random. The cinematography is serviceable, and I did like how the stark blacks of digital video bleed into the black in Art's monochromatic clown suit.

  It's a fun, unpretentious movie done in a way that seems unfashionable these days, where there's an unspoken rule that nastiness needs to be about something to justify itself  Sometimes nasty is all there is, innit? And anyhow, it's way better and more entertaining than a no-budget killer clown movie had any right to be.