“It all started,” Slotherhouse co-writer Brad Fowler said in an interview, “when a little old man in Florida asked, ‘What is the dumbest idea you can come up with?’ ” After about five minutes of “joking around”, Slotherhouse had emerged – a concept and a title in one fell swoop.
Sloths. The least predatory creature in the jungle, an animal that spends most of its time apparently asleep. Furry. Small. Cute. Not an anaconda, or a shark or a tyrannosaur. How about taking sloths and using them to menace a sorority house where a Mean Girls vibe separates out queen bitch Brianna (Sydney Craven – a Wes Craven-adjacent name to conjure with) from all the other young women at Sigma Lambda Theta, most notably of all, sweet, big-eyed Emily (Lisa Ambalavanar), into whose life comes a doe-eyed, hairy sloth.
No pets, says Brianna, whose word is the law in this house. It’s a mascot, says Emily, who knows her sorority house rules and regulations and is ready to quote them back at Brianna. And while she’s about it, temporarily lifted by her minor victory, Emily announces that she is going to run for the post of sorority house president, disturbing Brianna’s vision of a clear run at a third term.
What neither knows, though we do because we saw the pre-credits sequence where the sloth easily took out a crocodile, is that this furry critter is murderous. Blood will flow. And laughs, of a meta-horror-movies-at-their-worst sort.
Because that’s what Slotherhouse is, a poke at all the terrible creature features where what people say and do often makes no logical sense and even the dynamics of the horror changes scene to scene. The sort of film where one minute a sloth can do little more than just sit there cooing but the next seems to have somehow worked out how to use a mouse on a computer. Still later it’s driving a car. And somehow along the way, on its journey from jungle to civilisation, it seems to have developed an understanding about which sorority sister deserves a punishing death and which should survive. At least until the film’s third act when all bets are off and the sloth goes on the rampage and the Slaughterhouse/Slotherhouse play on words finally pays off.
Beyond the meta gag there isn’t much to see, though Slotherhouse undoubtedly knows its stuff when it comes to terrible horror movies. The actors do it all with the straightest of faces, and Sydney Craven’s mean-bitch Brianna goes all in, as does Lisa Ambalavanar as the goody-goody Emily. Both are too old to be sorority girls, but that too seems to be part of the joke.
Director Matthew Goodhue throws in a few references for horror hounds and knows his way round a horror movie. Towards the end, as the girls line up to elect their new president and the sloth gets ready to unleash carnage, Goodhue gets everyone dressed up in blood-red satin for a little Dario Argento homage – he is the king of the “hot girls at bay” horror movie after all.
Talking of which, hot girls I mean, there are plenty, which is also part of the joke, as is the almost relentless airheadedness, silliness, superficiality and, in the main, vileness of almost all the young women involved, apart from Bianca Beckles-Rose’s Zenny, a beacon of practicality, good sense and fair play whose demeanour, clothes and manly voice mark her out as different in all sorts of other ways too.
As for the creature, it is small and hairy and has nasty little eyes but there’s no doubting that it’s meant to be ridiculous. At one point Goodhue even throws in one of those scenes where a grown man wrestles with the murderous animal and it’s clear he’s doing all the work himself, pretending to be thrown about by an inert doll. If you’ve seen Victor Mature wrestling a lion (clearly stuffed) in 1949’s Samson and Delilah, this is the modern equivalent. Funny.
The Mean Girls meets Chucky meets Gremlins energy gets Slotherhouse most of the way towards the finish, though it is clearly limping over the line. A laurel wreath to composer Sam Ewing, whose score goes so far over the top early on that it sets the scene perfectly for what’s to come. There are worse ways to spend an evening than with this cute furry animal. Watch it while stroking the cat.
Slotherhouse – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
