As I mentioned in my previous post, I am currently on a binge of Halloween-related media to celebrate our now being in the spookiest month of the year, AKA October. After Netflix very helpfully notified me that Slaughterhouse Rulez had arrived on the streaming platform about a week or so ago, I decided that this was the perfect film to kick off this fear-stive (get it?) season.
First released in cinemas around October of 2018 (for Halloween, of course), Slaughterhouse Rulez is a comedy-horror set at a prestigious English boarding school that comes under attack after mysterious demonic creatures are accidentally released from the ground by a fracking operation on school grounds.
I remember watching the trailer for this movie when it first came out and being quite excited about it. It didn't look especially ground-breaking, unless you count the fracking, but it looked fun nonetheless. Unfortunately, as so often happens, the trailer proved to be a lot more fun than the film itself.
My biggest gripe with the film is that it never quite seems to know what it's doing, going in several directions (comedy, horror, and even social commentary) at once, but never quite managing to succeed in any of them. The funniest moments in the film come from the performances of Michael Sheen and Asa Butterfield, who play the school's headmaster (known as "The Bat") and the protagonist's snarky roommate, respectively. Sheen is delightfully hammy, and the enjoyment he seems to be taking in playing the comically pretentious schoolmaster is contagious. Butterfield likewise is a pleasure to watch, bringing a level of dry cynicism and vulnerability to the character of Willoughby that almost makes up for his clumsily-handled backstory.
The rest of the cast no doubt did their best with the scripts they were given, but in most cases the result is just... okay. Simon Pegg is under-utilised in his role as a housemaster who spends most of his time making emotional Skype calls to his evidently uninterested former lover (Margot Robbie), in a subplot that was perhaps intended to be humorous but gets boring around the third scene of Pegg crying and holding a phone. The two other main characters, middle-class new boy Don (Finn Cole) and upper-sixth "goddess" Clemsie (Hermione Corfield), are dull and forgettable. Don is cast as the status quo-challenging newcomer, who holds little charm outside of being the audience's surrogate, while Clemsie serves mainly as a love interest to Don and as fan service for the viewer (really, there didn't need to be that many shots of Corfield in a bra). Clemsie has a few token Strong Female Character scenes, such as her standing up to the headmaster and taking control of the car during a chase scene, but the film still ends with us having little conception of her character outside of being appealing to Don. |
Like the main characters, the horror aspect of the film is similarly unmemorable. Balancing laughs and scares is an achievement most horror-comedies fail to reach, Slaughterhouse Rulez among them. The monsters unearthed by the fracking operation are your fairly average hellhound type of creatures, forgettable enough that even at this point I am struggling to recall what they looked like. There is some gore and a few jump scares, nothing terribly impressive but the sort of thing which might have been satisfactory had the comedy side of the film held up. Sadly, this wasn't the case.
As for the social commentary aspect of the film, the writers seemed to take the opportunity of a plot set at your classical, posh English boarding school to make some criticisms of British classism and public school culture. At times this went so far as to imply that the monsters themselves are in some way symbolic of the toxicity of the school itself. It's an intriguing idea, to be fair, and it's a shame that most of the film's allusions to the school's harmfulness comes across as so shallow. The more villainous of the school's students refer to others as "plebs" or use homophobic slurs that go unchallenged even by the heroic characters, but there is something of a disconnect between these moments and the times when pupils like Clemsie state that they hate the school for vague, undefined reasons. Granted, treating topics like bullying and classism with the seriousness they deserve might be too great of a challenge for a simple horror-comedy, but that didn't stop the writers from including a subplot in which an old pupil kills himself after being subjected to homophobic bullying, leaving his surviving boyfriend depressed and on the brink of suicide himself. On the other hand, scenes of a young pupil being bullied as part of various hazing rituals (such as being tarred and feathered or gagged and tied to a sink) are played for laughs. Bullying is the tragic cause of suicide in one scene and a source of humour in the other. Like the rest of the film, Slaughterhouse Rulez's handling of bullying is uneven and confusing to watch.
While it is not among the best of horror comedy films, nor is Slaughterhouse Rulez among the worst of its kind. The humorous performances of Michael Sheen and Asa Butterfield provide some spots of light in a film that is otherwise mostly dull and thematically confusing - hardly good qualities for a film of any genre, much less one that depends on frights and laughs. If you are a particular fan of any of the creators involved, you might find it a justifiable watch. For everyone else, I'm sad to say that it is simply, tragically average.
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