SLAUGHTERHOUSE RULEZ: Uneven Comedic Horror That Needs To Go Back To School

Simon Pegg– check. Nick Frost– check. Horror/comedy- check. Edgar Wright– ……Edgar?

Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost first worked together on TV series Spaced and created a cannon of films together – Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World’s End  referred to as The Cornetto Trilogy. This successful partnership, particularly Shaun of the Dead, earned them the keys to the geek kingdom for their ability to combine comedy with horror/supernatural narratives and lashings of pop culture references and quotable dialogue.

This collaboration seems to have dissolved for now, with Wright hitching a ride to Hollywood with his critically lauded Baby Driver and Pegg becoming the reliable sidekick for big budget franchises like Star Trek and Mission Impossible. But with Slaughterhouse Rulez, it seems Pegg and Frost haven’t quite let go of the comedy/horror genre and have revisited old cinematic ground, only this time with a different director and with uneven results.

Boarding Behaviour

Slaughterhouse Rulez begins with likable Yorkshire lad Don (Finn Cole) being accepted into the eponymous school of the title, a sprawling countryside elite mansion. His enrollment is our introduction into the hierarchy, where we are presented with our key players in the narrative. They include Don’s roommate at the school Willoughby (Asa Butterfield), who is still processing the loss of his previous roommate through secretive but rebellious behavior. There is an overzealous head boy Clegg (Tom Rhys-Harries), who is the pantomime villain, and there is wet blanket, cricket obsessed teacher Mr Houseman (Simon Pegg).

The recent inclusion of female pupils at Slaughterhouse gives Don a potential love interest in the form of posh upper girl Clemsie (Hermione Corfield) and then there is a smattering of other pupils who may, or may not, become cannon fodder as the action unfolds. As Don tries to adjust to his new environment of snobbery, pompous privilege, old fashioned house rules and inherit bullying within its halls, he soon begins to realise there are potentially worse things afoot at Slaughterhouse.

The flamboyant but sly head master Mr. P Chapman aka The Bat (Michael Sheen) has sold parts of Slaughterhouse’s mass school grounds to a fracking company to pay for a new dry ski slope on campus. But the company’s drilling activities have created a sinkhole in the ominous woods and something wicked this way comes, out of the ground and into the school where the pupils and teachers will have to fight for their lives to make it through the night.

Copied homework

It may seem a little unfair to compare a film so strongly to another but when they have such an overlapping DNA it’s hard not to as Slaughterhouse Rulez takes so many cues from the Edgar/Pegg/Frost world. Director Crispian Mills, who previously worked with Pegg on A Fantastic Fear of Everything, must have realized the comparisons his film may get to his stars past works. Instead of going out of his way to avoid a resemblance, he walks straight into a similarities trap, by copying camera and editing techniques that viewers will identify. There is even a scene where Pegg eats a choc ice – almost as if to address the elephant in the room but maybe also to dispel it – to say this is a different beast but the problem is, it just highlights that Slaughterhouse Rulez is an inferior film.

One thing it doesn’t have compared to Shaun of the Dead, is the ability to blend comedy and horror into a successful formula with a patchy tone throughout, one that is neither funny nor scary. Jokes either fall flat or you can see the payoff coming from a mile away. For example, there is a dog called Mr. Chips which you know will be the punchline of a goodbye as soon as it is introduced.

The horror element from the creatures fails to produce any effective jumps or scares and there is no sense of high stakes involved in the fate of a bunch of, mostly unlikeable, characters. It is a film that totters around the edges of interest and weighty topics, such as a class system bullying, the current state of politics in Britain and the environmental hot potato of fracking. But it has nothing of merit to say about these matters and instead descends into fart jokes and comedy mutilation of body parts.

In Detention

Anyone hoping for the pairing of Pegg and Frost to produce some slapstick sparring will be disappointed as the two actors barely share the same screen, albeit for one underwhelming scene. Pegg’s character comes across a whiny useless individual and once again highlights Pegg’s inflated ego by having Margot Robbie as his love interest (the actress herself only appears via Skype, the definition of phoning it in). Frost meanwhile, along with all the other protestors to the fracking, is reduced to a stereotype, a hippy stoner who is just as interested in flogging magic mushrooms to teens as he is in saving the planet.

The inclusion of girls at the school feels less like the chance to have some strong female characters in the mix and more that the filmmakers were worried it would come across as too much of a boy’s only club, which happens anyway. Yes, the only two girls in the narrative, who feel as thinly drawn as Daphne and Velma from Scooby Doo, do get to up tools in the fight against the creatures.

But this comes a little late after Corfield has had to strip off her school shirt (conveniently revealing lacy underwear) and also after her cleavage has been ogled from a vantage point by her potential love interest. The only person who gets any character development and interesting arch is Asa Butterfield who, with the voice of Ben Whishaw and the face of Bud Cort (circa Harold and Maude), makes good use of his impish but wounded character in the limited time the film allows before returning to juvenile humour.

Slaughterhouse Rulez: Conclusion

It is hard to determine who Slaughterhouse Rulez is aimed at, it has a 15 certificate but feels like it was made for 12-year-old boys, save for some references to other films which the younger audience won’t get. It is understandable how this project would have appealed to Pegg and Frost, the chance to rekindle some of the magic and fun from their earlier work, but it screams of a film where all the amusement was had on set and none of this made it onto the screen.

It speaks volumes when the best part of the film is a reference to Malcolm McDowell in Lindsay Anderson’s anarchic public-school film If!. But again it just highlights that there are better school films than Slaughterhouse Rulez, that there are better horror films than Slaughterhouse Rulez, and that there are better comedies than Slaughterhouse Rulez. Hell, there are just better films than Slaughterhouse Rulez.

Do you like a film that is a mash up of genres? Will you put Slaughterhouse Rulez on your film curriculum? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below!

Slaughterhouse Rulez was released in theaters in the UK on October 31, 2018. For all international release dates, see here.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6ruo11