Slaughter (2009)
Johnny Butane
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Reviewed by Johnny Butane
Starring Lucy Holt, Antonia Bernath, David Sterene, Craig Robert Young
Directed by Stuart Hopewell
Distributed by After Dark Films and Lionsgate Home Entertainment
Wow, where the hell to start with this, the first of this year’s After Dark Horrorfest features I had to sit through? How about with the fact that, until the title credits of the film, I really thought this was the same Slaughter that won the Angel Baby Entertainment screenplay competition. It’s not. Oh, dear God is it not. That movie at least had something of a premise….
Watching Slaughter is best described as an arduous task. Actually, you don’t watch Slaughter, you survive it. It’s probably the single most boring film I have ever seen on the big screen from any genre. Literally nothing at all happens for 45 minutes. That is unless you count the instantly annoying opening sequence, during which the camera never stays focused for more than 5 seconds, or a random scene of someone bleeding, crawling across a field.
Other than that, you have 45 minutes of two girls becoming friends, talking about their troubled pasts, and going to clubs. And did I mention how incredibly, excruciatingly, fantastically boring it all is? Enough to make both my wife and I want to get up and leave numerous times.
All right, so what the fuck is Slaughter about? Excellent question. Apparently, at some point, it becomes about a girl who’s crazy because she was abused as a kid by her father, and now fucks and kills men to deal with her issues. Her father, feeling responsible for her craziness, keeps it all quiet by chopping up the bodies and feeding them to their pigs. And of course no one’s asking questions out there in the real world like where all these guys are… So there’s the plot, which is supposed to be a big “reveal” or twist or some such nonsense, but really, by the time it’s all finally exposed, you could not possibly care any less.
Now I’ve now saved you the trouble of sitting through Slaughter to get to the end by telling you the only worthwhile bit of information about it, so please do not waste the hour and half of your life and try and see for yourself if I’m right. Seriously. It’s so insanity inducingly dull that you will hate yourself in the morning for having done so.
And it’s not just the story, oh god no. The editing is atrocious, the lighting is AVP: Requiem-level bad, and the acting is passable, at best. I mean, all these girls have to do is act pensive, in the case of our “hero”, or slutty and misunderstood, in the case farm girl, so it’s not like they were given anything that would challenge them.
But so-so acting side, all the blame for why Slaughter sucked so badly can be placed on the shoulders of those who made it. There is no excuse, at all, to make a movie this clichéd, uninteresting, or tepid with the kind of budget they obviously had to work with in this day and age. At the very least the core concept of a string of boyfriends getting killed could’ve been milked for some gore or red herrings or scenes of murder, but no … nothing even close happens.
If Slaughter is any indication of what After Dark continues to view as films worthy of being seen on the big screen, I really can’t see how Horrorfest can continue. Though sadly, the festival is not know for it’s quality choices already and Slaughter has only served to validate that opinion.
One word: avoid.
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1/2 out of 5
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