Terrifier 3 is technically well-composed. The effects are solid, the movie looks professionally shot, the performances are given some genuine care and effort. I enjoyed a good number of scenes, even some gorier ones. There's an extent to where seeing simplistic character stereotypes like preppy college kids, drunk gruff bar guys, etc dealing with an onslaught of creative violence can be a fun time. Especially with the goofy slapstick-y performance from Art, it gives the scenes a campy feel that can be entertaining and interesting in it's own ways, even if it's still not my favorite thing ever.
I just had no fun in the third act of this film. Art wasn't doing anything fun or creative. The kills got excessively, needlessly cruel and dark against characters who had been developed into actual people and not stereotypes. The main antagonist was just boring and edgelord-y, and again, needlessly cruel. It lingered in weird places,
I just don't see any reason to sit with the sobbing child begging for her dead mother for as long as they did. I just found nothing fun or interesting about that.
It didn't bore me, like some other violent slashers have. But it trips over itself in a lot of areas in order to provide the audience with excessive blood and misery, and at a point, I had enough of that and didn't need anymore. Especially towards the end, the violence and misery just felt kind of exploitative and needless, while also really serving to rush through the already thin story that had been building.
The film portrays around the mid-point how these characters are going through legitimately traumatic events and how that's really negatively effecting their lives, and shows how the rubbernecking and gawking from outsiders just for the thrill and drama of it just leads to more distress and trauma for the victim. It then proceeds to make the audience the rubbernecker, lingering on scenes that have no plot significance, aren't that interesting from a physical effects perspective, and simply serve to make the audience and characters feel worse. I think it just serves to weaken the thematic core of the film to pace and shoot the film from the perspective of the villains, while portraying the story as if it were rooting for the protagonists. It felt like the film's sequence of events was composed by the True Crime podcaster the film wants you to hate, and it just led to a weird mismatch.
It's...certainly something, and I guess it has it's place. But I definitely agree that parts of this film feel very "Faces of Death"-y, and not in any kind of positive way that could be taken. There is some legitimate craft here, but a lot of it is very messy, and overall I think these films are just very much not my thing.