Leone's second journey with Art the Clown hits the ground running, assuming viewers already know the score, and therefore spends zero energy explaining anything. But this makes the film something of a stream-of-consciousness nightmare made up of a series of nonsensical, demonic vignettes instead of a cohesive narrative. It's one scene of playfully abhorrent depravity after another, each sequence of unhinged ultraviolence more repugnantly punishing than the last.

At such an epic length, it all becomes somewhat desensitizing. People's skulls get cleaved open, eyes get gauged out, arms get torn from their sockets, and happy singing minstrels get set ablaze. Some get bludgeoned by homemade clubs decked out in rusty nails and other sharpened implements, while others have the skin ripped from their body and a mixture of bleach and salt exuberantly rubbed into their wounds. Barely alive skeletons cry out for their mothers, all while Art looks on happily, as if he's pulled off the greatest gag in clown comedy history.

Interspersed in all of this mayhem is a story of a young sister and brother grieving for a lost parent while still trying to figure out the mess their lives have become, hoping they aren't making things too miserable for their harried, if loving, mother. They have visions of Art and his pipsqueak henchman, including an outlandish dream sequence with its own theme song and smiling, happy victims eager to be dismembered by the clown. Jonathan even has an encounter with a disemboweled rodent — your guess as to what that has to do with anything is as good as mine.

That's the thing about Terrifier 2: it refuses to do a single coherent thing. There's the vaguest of ideas that Sienna and Jonathan's dad knew what was coming, as well as something to do with a mystical sword, but Leone doesn't spend much effort spelling out those or other narrative elements with any clarity. This means that the absurd, over-the-top climax is a bewildering hodgepodge of exploitive vulgarities, augmented by sudden bursts of heroic zaniness right out of Heavy Metal or a 1980s glam-rock music video. Making heads or tails out of any of it? That's impossible.

I should note that Leone is in complete control. Nothing happens that he does not intend, and as unwieldy as they are, the pieces of the film bizarrely still fit together nicely. Leone constructs wonders of bloodcurdling calamity the likes of which I've never seen before; the makeup effects, as utterly disgusting as they may be, are impressively eye-popping. And Art the Clown is a memorably malevolent creature of carnage, played with a jovial wink and disquieting smile by Thornton, and it's easy to see why fans have grown so fond of the slasher villain.

As remarkable as all that may be, Terrifier 2 is exhausting. Leone's sequel wore me out, it's objectionably devious nastiness too extreme, even for me.