Art the Clown is back in Damien Leone’s two-hour-twenty coulrophobic epic.

One year after the Halloween massacre of Terrifier, Art (David Howard Thornton) starts nosing around a recently bereaved family, providing a lot of setup for what is essentially (a lot) more of the same. Considering its reputation as an all-out gorefest, Terrifier 2 is surprisingly long-winded, spending more time establishing its family dynamics than dismantling them.

This proves something of a double-edged mace. On the one hand we get to know and like the protagonist (Lauren LaVera), a stronger lead performance than horror flicks with literally 100 times the budget. But the characters get lost among the movie’s self-indulgent angel imagery and magic swords, and Art’s antics start feeling krusty.

It is easy to see why genre fans have embraced the ultraviolent franchise; in a sea of sanitised commercial horror, Terrifier 2 is in-your-face about wanting us to have fun. And for a while it succeeds, with a creakiness to its ’80s-inspired slapstick gore that ensures everyone is in on the joke. But the gleeful creativity ebbs out of the film like so much blood, and by the end the only person having fun is Art himself.