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Slaughterhouse
List Price: Unknown [Buy now and save at Amazon]
Slashers nowadays are kind of a bore. For all the constant winking at the audience and innumerable references to gorefests of yesteryear, it's almost as if the filmmakers are wearing a kevlar condom -- going through all the motions without any of the feeling. Still, the Decade of Excess churned out enough of the good stuff to mine for seemingly forever, and "Slaughterhouse", the first release from Program Power's cult horror imprint Lucky 13, is one of those easily-overlooked, gruesome little gems, spiffed up and given new life on everyone's favorite mass-market digital home video format.
When ol' Lester Bacon discovers his pig-boy son Buddy has the rotting corpses of two teenagers who disturbed his beloved pet swine suspended from meathooks in the run-down family slaughterhouse, a way to get revenge on those conspiring to sieze Les' home, former business, and land becomes a little too evident. Les invites them to the old slaughterhouse, feigning a change of heart and knocking 'em off, one by one. Matters get a little more complicated when the daughter of one of his intended victims, along with some of her '80s slasher-fodder-buddies, decide to kill some time at the now-condemned plant just as Buddy starts putting the 'slaughter' back in 'slaughterhouse' with his bonecrushing two-fisted cleaver...
"Slaughterhouse" has all the gore of '80s slashers but takes a different approach, giving us a creepy but likeable villain in Buddy. Most of the badniks in these sorts of movies are largely unseen, mysterious one-note masked murderers, but Buddy's more fleshed out (and how!), as a hog-obsessed, simple-minded, pig-squealing farmboy, eager to please his father. The acting's nothing great, with Lester and Buddy stealing the show, and the super-cute Jane Higginson (of "Silent Night, Deadly Night 5" and "Danger Zone II: Reaper's Revenge" fame) standing out as Annie. The usual new-wave soundtrack's above average, complete with a hysterical high school dance sequence. Also, unlike similar entries, "Slaughterhouse" is well-paced and ends on a great note. There's not much I'd rather watch than a good '80s slasher, and the wildly-entertaining "Slaughterhouse" is definitely worth a look for those unfortunate similarly-minded genre fans.
Video/Audio: The full-frame image is clean and reasonably sharp, looking about as good as a film shot on numerous second-hand stocks and ends possibly can. Sure, it's grainy and colors are generally flat, making "Slaughterhouse" appear as if it were shot with a Bolex in 1982, but that's all part of its charm. A little rough around the edges, maybe, but nothing that should turn slasher buffs away. The audio is more front-dominated than its 'Ultra Stereo Surround Sound' title might indicate, though it's decent enough. In a couple of the music-heavy scenes, the dialogue is a little too low in the mix, but...I dunno, going into any detail discussing the quality of the audio and video of a movie like this is pretty pointless. Nothing remarkable on either front, but both are good enough that I could tell what was going on, and really, that's all I was expecting.
Supplements: One oddity about the commentary is that the discussion from the filmmakers comes from the right channel, but from the left, at pretty much the same volume, is a mono version of the film's soundtrack. This is extremely distracting and pretty much impossible to sit through without drastically changing the volume on the left speaker. It's worth the effort, though -- writer/director Rick Roessler, producer Jerry Encoe, and production designer Michael Scaglione contribute a solid commentary, fat-packed with anecdotes, shooting locations, props, casting decisions, tales of budget overruns, creative workarounds, and technical notes. Roessler and Encow also provide their own featurettes, each complete with rather inaccurate titles. "The Making Of 'Slaughterhouse'" is about the concept and origin and Buddy, on-screen and off. Encoe, whose presence is more stitled than Roessler's, talks about the "Financing And Distribution Of Independent Horror Films", although the information provided is a little too vague and specific to "Slaughterhouse" to be the useful guide for budding filmmakers that its title seems to suggest. Encoe mentions that a rough cut was done on 3/4" video, and five segments of raw footage from that cut are also presented.
One of the larger collections of promotional bits I've seen, "Slaughterhouse" has four TV spots, a 'no smoking' promo, a teaser, and a theatrical trailer. There's also footage of Buddy greeting fans at Georgetown, hamming it up in theaters showing "Slaughterhouse", and posing with cardboard cutouts of Ollie North and Ronald Reagan elsewhere in DC. Oodles of production stills, publicity photos, and behind-the-scenes pics are also available for your viewing pleasure. On the DVD-ROM portion of the disc are somewhere around a hundred stills, sketches of ad campaign concepts, newspaper clippings, advertisements, reviews, the 16-page working budget form, the original distribution contract, and the complete screenplay.
So, should I buy it? If you made it this far, then yeah, you owe it to yourself. "Slaughterhouse" is a horror movie that doesn't take itself too seriously but has a couple of tense scenes and its fair share of gore, and after factoring in the slew of extras and an easy-to-swallow retail price of twenty bucks, this disc comes highly recommended.
When ol' Lester Bacon discovers his pig-boy son Buddy has the rotting corpses of two teenagers who disturbed his beloved pet swine suspended from meathooks in the run-down family slaughterhouse, a way to get revenge on those conspiring to sieze Les' home, former business, and land becomes a little too evident. Les invites them to the old slaughterhouse, feigning a change of heart and knocking 'em off, one by one. Matters get a little more complicated when the daughter of one of his intended victims, along with some of her '80s slasher-fodder-buddies, decide to kill some time at the now-condemned plant just as Buddy starts putting the 'slaughter' back in 'slaughterhouse' with his bonecrushing two-fisted cleaver...
"Slaughterhouse" has all the gore of '80s slashers but takes a different approach, giving us a creepy but likeable villain in Buddy. Most of the badniks in these sorts of movies are largely unseen, mysterious one-note masked murderers, but Buddy's more fleshed out (and how!), as a hog-obsessed, simple-minded, pig-squealing farmboy, eager to please his father. The acting's nothing great, with Lester and Buddy stealing the show, and the super-cute Jane Higginson (of "Silent Night, Deadly Night 5" and "Danger Zone II: Reaper's Revenge" fame) standing out as Annie. The usual new-wave soundtrack's above average, complete with a hysterical high school dance sequence. Also, unlike similar entries, "Slaughterhouse" is well-paced and ends on a great note. There's not much I'd rather watch than a good '80s slasher, and the wildly-entertaining "Slaughterhouse" is definitely worth a look for those unfortunate similarly-minded genre fans.
Video/Audio: The full-frame image is clean and reasonably sharp, looking about as good as a film shot on numerous second-hand stocks and ends possibly can. Sure, it's grainy and colors are generally flat, making "Slaughterhouse" appear as if it were shot with a Bolex in 1982, but that's all part of its charm. A little rough around the edges, maybe, but nothing that should turn slasher buffs away. The audio is more front-dominated than its 'Ultra Stereo Surround Sound' title might indicate, though it's decent enough. In a couple of the music-heavy scenes, the dialogue is a little too low in the mix, but...I dunno, going into any detail discussing the quality of the audio and video of a movie like this is pretty pointless. Nothing remarkable on either front, but both are good enough that I could tell what was going on, and really, that's all I was expecting.
Supplements: One oddity about the commentary is that the discussion from the filmmakers comes from the right channel, but from the left, at pretty much the same volume, is a mono version of the film's soundtrack. This is extremely distracting and pretty much impossible to sit through without drastically changing the volume on the left speaker. It's worth the effort, though -- writer/director Rick Roessler, producer Jerry Encoe, and production designer Michael Scaglione contribute a solid commentary, fat-packed with anecdotes, shooting locations, props, casting decisions, tales of budget overruns, creative workarounds, and technical notes. Roessler and Encow also provide their own featurettes, each complete with rather inaccurate titles. "The Making Of 'Slaughterhouse'" is about the concept and origin and Buddy, on-screen and off. Encoe, whose presence is more stitled than Roessler's, talks about the "Financing And Distribution Of Independent Horror Films", although the information provided is a little too vague and specific to "Slaughterhouse" to be the useful guide for budding filmmakers that its title seems to suggest. Encoe mentions that a rough cut was done on 3/4" video, and five segments of raw footage from that cut are also presented.
One of the larger collections of promotional bits I've seen, "Slaughterhouse" has four TV spots, a 'no smoking' promo, a teaser, and a theatrical trailer. There's also footage of Buddy greeting fans at Georgetown, hamming it up in theaters showing "Slaughterhouse", and posing with cardboard cutouts of Ollie North and Ronald Reagan elsewhere in DC. Oodles of production stills, publicity photos, and behind-the-scenes pics are also available for your viewing pleasure. On the DVD-ROM portion of the disc are somewhere around a hundred stills, sketches of ad campaign concepts, newspaper clippings, advertisements, reviews, the 16-page working budget form, the original distribution contract, and the complete screenplay.
So, should I buy it? If you made it this far, then yeah, you owe it to yourself. "Slaughterhouse" is a horror movie that doesn't take itself too seriously but has a couple of tense scenes and its fair share of gore, and after factoring in the slew of extras and an easy-to-swallow retail price of twenty bucks, this disc comes highly recommended.
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