While i’m sure i can find more old 80s school themed/adjacent slasher, this September we’re doing something a bit more recent for a change, from a chronological standpoint, by unearthing from my Blu-Ray collection 2023’s Slotherhouse.
And yes, indeed, this is a 10/10 title for you killer animal slasher film.
It really is indeed about a killer sloth, and the house is not any common house, it’s a sorority house, where Emily Young, a college student brings a three-toed sloth from the jungle, thinking it can work as a “house mascot” and hence help her be elected as the sorority’s president.
But of course things go awry as a series of sorority girls is being killed, and all the evidence strongly implicates it’s actually the cute sloth the one doing all the murders…
I’ll be honest, the promo material made it look like it was chomping off the modern “retro 80s trend”, specifically aping Happy Death Day…. but i was mistaken, this isn’t the case, as Slotherhouse – aside taking place in modern times – is oddly not even that much interested in aping other slasher films. Not too specifically, anyway.
Yes, you’ll get the deliberate cliches of the sloth getting thrown off a window from the first floor and then vanishing like it’s fucking Michael Myers in Halloween (or how he sneaks into hospitals, there’s no ambulance switcharoo equivalent in this case), or the “thunder timed shadow step of the killer”, and it feels like an animal equivalent of Chucky or a Critter, especially the latter since the killer sloth is an animatronic, but the focus of Slotherhouse is definitely not on gruesome gore or high volumes of blood, but the sloth itself.
Sorry, herself, she’s a slay queen also in the non-literal sense, as most of the expected kills of the sorority girls are offscreen, very low on blood, and compiled in a quick montage, it becomes clear the movie priorities aren’t in that, but on showing the sloth doing some incredible stuff, from navigating social networks on the computer (yes, with her claws and all) and getting angry at the tweets, shotgunning beers, taking selfies, roofing a drink and even using a car.
I do like the absolutely trash approach to this, there’s no point trying to even begin justifying how the fuck could a sloth ever do such things, it just does, after all it’s hard to not side with the killer animal in a deliberately exaggerated world of slasher cannon fodder characters where hierarchy is dominated by the follower count on Instagram, of brainless bastards that took the sloth away from his habitat for some stupid social network-era vulva measuring contest.
And i kinda do get why, after all the sloth animatronic is the best damn thing about this movie, it’s great, not just as an absurd killer animal muppet but also because the craft it’s pretty good as well, it’s a joy seeing it do the stupidest shit either and even the absurd way it somehow manages to get the jump on people whose character can – and actually IS – explained-summed in a short phone message, even the protagonist doesn’t have much going on, besides her best friend actually caring for her, ignoring all the social media fuckery and asking her to bring the sloth back to his habitat.
Still don’t know why the sloth would go out of her way to kill the protag’s BFF, aside from the fact the movie “can’t” finish at the 60 minutes mark…. i mean, it could, it really could wrap up there and then, the main plot has been basically concluded, but even so its just 90 minutes and the movie never feels long (even though it could be shorter, it really could have), its funny, very entertaining, the acting is quite decent, and production values are fairly good.
I was afraid this was gonna another case where i slogged through the film and ended up wishing they just made the poster… it’s not, even if feels like this is a made up film made for memes so you can laugh at while you scroll through social media, and then move on, but in this case it’s not so bad and or boring that you wish they just made the poster and a short video on Youtube, this is actually entertaining and delivers the expect trash delirium modern audiences expect from a concept as stupid as the “killer sloth on sorority row”, without being overly long, it’s a cute funny farce, though you’d wish there was (alongside some actual satire) some proper gore and blood to satisfy the slasher genre buffs, Slotherhouse it’s oddly very tame in this regard.
It’s nothing too special but it’s also surprisingly decent slasher comedy, given the modern approach to doing these stupid killer animals flick or slashers in general, and i can see this gaining a bit of a cult following over time, if nothing else for the very good animatronic killer sloth effects.
