Slaughterhouse Rulez
Cert: 15 / 104 mins / Dir. Crispian Mills / Trailer
Well, fourth-quarter is the graveyard shift in the cinematic calendar, and the dumping ground for many an oddity that film distributors have no other slot for. And they don't come much odder or more dumped than director and co-writer Crispian Mills sophomore creature-com, Slaughterhouse Rulez.
When a place becomes unexpectedly available at a prestigious boarding school, working class northern teenager Don (Finn Cole*1) is encouraged to apply by his socially-aspirant mum. Struggling to adapt to the norms of private education, Finn gradually forms a guarded friendship with fellow sixth-formers Clemsie (Hermione Corfield*2) and Willoughby (Asa Butterfield*3). But things take a sinister turn when it's revealed that the mysterious headmaster (Michael Sheen) is in cahoots with a fracking company, and their drilling at the edge of the school's grounds has awoken something - or things. With teacher Meredith Houseman*4 (Simon Pegg) and environmental protestor Woody (Nick Frost) thrown into the mix, traditional allegiances have to be discarded as a weekend of off-term debauchery turns into a comic fight for survival...
HAMMERING
Yeah, it's not great. Not great at all. The main problem is that the setup itself feels laboured, so no script coming off the back of that is ever going to sparkle, and so neither are the performances. The film spends the first twenty minutes not quite getting over its own joke that a school would be named Slaughterhouse*5, hammering home the archaic eccentricities of British private education like no-one else had noticed.
Cole, Corfield and Butterworth are basically fine, but none of them really have the acting chops at this point to lead the movie's young cast, even as an ensemble. At the other end of the scale, Pegg, Frost and Sheen are left to mug and autopilot through their (largely completely separate) scenes. All of the above need firmer direction, as does the screenplay itself. Instead we get a loose collection of weak sketches from the man who brought us A Fantastic Fear of Everything (34%).
ESCHERING
The more creative the film tries to be with its monster scenes (of which there are surprisingly few, for a monster movie), the cheaper it all feels. Predator-lite heat vision and shadow-play can't disguise the obvious budgetary constraints, and the creature shots we do get strike an uneven balance between admittedly strong props with severely limited movement and fluid-but-murky-as-hell CGI.
More a clunky homage to teen horror than actually being one itself, there's little in the way of thrills and even less in shocks. A few smirks are to be had in the script, but no actual laughs. It's hard to know exactly what Slaughterhouse Rulez is trying to be, and as a result it's often hard to know exactly how badly it's failing.
DONALDING
Monsters or otherwise, the movie as a whole feels uninspired. Even with its heavy-handed fracking plot, you'd swear this had been sitting on a shelf since 2006, when Pegg and Frost were still enough of a thing to draw audiences with their presence alone.
The fact that Mills continually lifts beats from Edgar Wright's Cornetto trilogy while under-using those films' leading stars tells the audience how thin on the ground the ideas are. Slaughterhouse Rulez wants to be Harry Potter for fans of The World's End, but comes out more like Percy Jackson in the vein of Lesbian Vampire Killers.
DUCKING
Stories with a young leading cast aim to transport the audience back to imagined ideals of their youth, with camaraderie and adventure. Horror-tinged movies of this ilk either want the viewer to think that they'd love to be in that situation with the heroes, or just be relieved they're in the cinema watching at a safe distance. But for all the two-hour runtime and backstory bombardment, there's no immersion here.
The story isn't engaging enough to be a spectator-led affair, instead feeling like none of this matters. It's faintly ironic that the film is set in a public school since the it feels like it's been written by a drama student 6th Former with no outside social contacts.
Slaughterhouse Rulez is never flat-out awful, but its waste of a decent cast is an affront to the acting profession. There's the suggestion that this probably felt a lot more coherent and meaningful on-set, when everything was being experienced in a non-linear order and the final product was still a hazy dream. But hazy dreams produce hazy results, and this film should be included in the Media Studies module teaching that very lesson…
Lesbian Vampire Killers, The Festival. Yeah.
No.
The impact will be lessened even more in your living room, but it's the natural home of this.
Hahahaha, hell no.
That's entirely possible, yes.
Not that I heard. And in a flick like this, it would likely be front-and-centre if it were there.
Level 1: Well aside from some of the most cack-handed Star Wars references you've ever seen committed to film, Unkar Plutt is in this. So is Tallie. It's no consolation.
*1 Finn Cole is 23 years old. [ BACK ]
*2 Hermione Corfield is 24 years old. [ BACK ]
*3 Asa Butterfield is 21. These are your teen-leads. It's like Grease never happened. [ BACK ]
*4 These really are the characters' names, by the way, I'm not making this up. [ BACK ]
*5 The title is (from what I can tell) effectively a portmanteau pun on Tom Sharpe's Cambridge-satire Porterhouse Blue and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, with the mis-spelling of 'Rules' lending the same air of intellectual confidence instilled by a hairdressing business with "Kutz" in its name. [ BACK ]
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