Oh dear. I very much disliked the first two, but as a completionist and as someone who's willing to change their mind, I went in with an open mind. It was a particularly fruitful opportunity for Terrifier 3, as this was my first Terrifier film in a theater, at the largest Dolby screen available here, on Halloween night. Even moreso, I was doing a double feature, and I had just watched the atrocious Venom: The Last Dance. I was ready for anything but that. And I didn't eat beforehand, I'm not an imbecile! No snacks, only plain water. I was prepared.
I was kind of enjoying the first fifteen minutes; the much improved production values were very welcome, and the soundtrack was nice. Maybe I could've lived with a 90-minute version of this, but for some ungodly, illconceived reason, these Terrifier sequels have to run for over two hours. It's madness, there's no material here beyond the kills, and there's too many of those at an uncouth level of brutalization to really leave any other feeling but desensitization. It gets dull so quickly, there's no stakes to any of it. Any attempts at lore or plot are a terrible waste of time, and thinking about it in hindsight, maybe the first Terrifier was the best one after all. At least it knew what it was and it was a perfectly fine, merciful 85 minutes. Sure, it was incompetently made and looked the worst, but as said, it's short. Maybe I like short. God knows I don't like this.
I do respect what a huge success these films have been for their modest budgets and origins, it's a story of perseverance against an industry that was very unwelcoming to these sloppy, blood-stained globs of clown manure. But there's an audience. My audience was laughing through the whole thing like they were at a comedy club. That was the weirdest aspect to me and my friend. SURE, some of the kills can be funny with how over the top the violence is, but this audience reaction kind of brought the questioning Karen out of me. For example, the laughing started at the very first moment of violence: the sound of Art hacking a child into pieces with an axe off-screen. The idea of that was enough to make a proper portion of the audience laugh. I don't know about that, girlfriend. This isn't my scene.
Undoubtedly I'll be complaining about Terrifier 4 in 12 months, or whenever it hits streaming. I'm not going back to a theater for another one of these ever again, but as said, I'm a completionist and I make all sorts of bad decisions every year. We'll see.