No good will come of this.
CW: infamously grim and bloody with buckets of gore
Much as I like horror I'm actually quite squeamish and don't normally watch straight slasher movies. They've usually nothing at all to say and filled with misogynistic violence. However with the third instalment out now and a fourth on the way I thought this needed watching.
It's got nothing to say and is filled with misogynistic violence of the grossest kind, but it's an absolute lesson in what a talented filmmaker can do for the price of a new car.
Almost every shot lingers and is beautifully composed. It is, dare I say it, quite stylishly done. David Howard Thornton is magnetic as the silent sinister clown killer. Kind-of female lead Jenna Kanell was a real catch, elevating all the scenes she is in. It's tense and creepy and for all its trumpeted gore they simply didn't have the money for that much of it so you see flashes of it stitched together with its implied infliction. The infamous hacksaw scene has the actual nastiness on screen for mere seconds.
Sadly it bogs down in the last quarter where they bring in a couple more people to be victims and there's very much a sense of "look we need to get to 80+ minutes runtime everybody" where it simply doesn't have the same style. I know movies aren't shot chronologically but it feels like they did and ran out of steam. It's microbudget maybe that's actually what happened.
This establishes Damien Leone as a singularly resourceful Indie filmmaker, 7/10 but oh boy is it grim, approach with caution.