Hot Bloods is back! Did you miss us? This time, we’re reviewing the horror comedy film Slaughterhouse Rulez (2018), dir. Crispian Mills, currently available to watch on Netflix in Australia.
Lauren’s verdict:
Don (Finn Cole), an apathetic British teen, is pushed to attend fancy boarding school – Slaughterhouse – following his father’s death. Don is soon inducted into a culture of power-hungry elites and systemic bullying. When a drilling tower is constructed in the woods near the school, it comes to light that their self-absorbed principal “The Bat” (Michael Sheen) has sold school land to a fracking company. Little do they know that the fracking is about to unleash a terrifying demonic scourge, that only the students and their nervous head teacher, Mr. Houseman (Simon Pegg), can stop.
As a big fan of 2004’s Shaun of The Dead, I was excited to see Pegg back in the horror-comedy saddle. I expected excessive blood and gore, comically over-the-top British terror, and a token Nick Frost cameo. What I didn’t expect, though, was to be so underwhelmed.
I could see where Slaughterhouse Rulez was trying to lead us – a poor kid joins a school for the wealthy elite and must navigate arrogant bullies and ineffective teachers to win the heart of the popular girl of his dreams. Nice. While a band of environmental activists try to thwart an evil fracking company drilling beneath the school, in order to prevent environmental catastrophe. Sure, okay. Oh and they manage to unleash a hoard of subterranean demon beasts instead. Huh…
Don’t get me wrong, I can forgive a slapstick dark comedy for being goofy and unrealistic, but the script seemed like two plots conceived separately and then hastily glued together. Managing to pole-vault cleanly over unrealistic and straight onto the soft, pillowy cushion of utter incoherence. Unfortunately for us, the main characters weren’t fleshed out very well either. Our protagonist, Don, who was pegged as charming, was about as interesting as an aged sock. His beautiful, wealthy, love-interest Clemsie (Hermione Corfield) was sadly another two-dimensional woman with an obligatory shirtless scene. Not to mention, the story’s comic relief, Will (Asa Butterfield), who should have been our much-needed comedic respite from all the blood and gore, ended up having the most tragic backstory of them all.
Horror films need to work just as hard as other films to get us to understand who their main characters really are. We need to know what motivates them, where their loyalties lie, and what they do and don’t like about themselves. This guarantees that when those monsters start sniffing in their direction, we get scared for them. We don’t want these kids to die, because we know them.
Slaughterhouse Rulez offers up plenty of dialogue, but very little actual connection. And that’s insanely disappointing. What made Shaun of the Dead a great film was not the gore, or the one-liners – but Shaun’s evolution from selfish to self-sacrificial. Yes, horror films are about survival, but they’re also about love. What fears would you face to save the people who mean the most to you?
Choosing to fill a script with shallow characters and un-engaging backstories, only serves to rob the audience of any actual connection. We need to know them, we need to like them. And when a demon creature rips off their limbs, God dammit, we need to feel bad about it.
1 out of 5 Unutilised Michael Sheens 🎭
Jeremy’s verdict:
We’d be forgiven for thinking that the first film from Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s production company, Stolen Picture, would be blindingly entertaining. Given the fantastic track record both of these creatives have and their chemistry, who would expect anything less? If it feels like I’m setting the bar high for the two, it’s only because many viewers like myself have so much faith in their abilities. Unfortunately, Slaughterhouse Rulez, the first film from Stolen Picture, falls disappointingly short of this bar and ends up looking just a little defeated.
Directed by Crispian Mills, who wrote the screenplay with Henry Fitzherbert, Slaughterhouse dips its toes into a few genres at once: with the elite high-school setting, it provides ample space for Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings references, comedic takes on avoiding the prefects in charge of the place while smoking cigarettes, and teenage schoolboys being absolutely awful to each other (it wouldn’t be a co-ed boarding school without boys making unnecessary homophobic slurs, right?). It then leans into horror with its core focus on environmental destruction and fracking: the monsters being both, yes, metaphorically the humans who exploit the earth at such great cost for financial gain – and the literal monsters that predictably emerge from the dig sites of such projects. And comedy! Well, comedy of a sort.
The laughs in Slaughterhouse feel few and far between. Our core group of teenagers who band together to discover the school’s secrets and the destruction in the nearby forest don’t engage with us emotionally either – the closest we get is a plotline connecting Willoughby (Asa Butterfield) to a student who previously took his own life, but even this emotional work is shattered by Don (Finn Cole), our protagonist, whose response holds no real sincerity or compassion. Instead, our connection to this group of teenagers wavers and wanders, and this more than anything is the issue at the core of this film.
If we had charming and loveable characters to grow attached to, other elements of the film might become less important and forgivable. But without those characters, the film’s stumbles only seem greater. CGI showing us the monster’s point of view felt dated; the Draco-Malfoy-esque Clegg (Tom Rhys Harries) was so over-the-top as a character, it felt hard to situate him within the broader tone of the narrative (through no fault of Harries’, I might add); and slightly odd directorial choices in framing, zooms, and unnecessary flashbacks pulled me out of the film when I was immersed.
Where does Slaughterhouse land it? Simon Pegg’s character is two dimensional but provides the ounce of emotion and comedy the film needs to not become entirely flat, and with a few instances of his fantastic physical comedy thrown in, he keeps the film moving along. And Nick Frost’s appearance as Woody Chapman, the environmental activist in the forest, complete with grills and hilarious drawl (“You boys wanna buy some drugs?”), actually got me excited for where the film might go. But even that felt short lived.
Slaughterhouse makes it easy to point at things that didn’t go right – which is a shame because perhaps with a tighter screenplay and better character foundations, it might’ve been a different story. I couldn’t help thinking about what this film might’ve been in someone like Edgar Wright’s hands. In the meantime, it’s worth looking elsewhere for your horror comedy and boarding school adventures – there isn’t much to be found digging here.
1 out of 5 Unutilised Michael Sheens 🎭
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