Slaughterhouse

Before I describe the film itself, I find I must describe the DVD. Essentially, what happened is that the company releasing this blatantly just burned the movie – fullscreen – onto some DVDRs and slapped labels onto them. The case directly lists it as a DVD-9 and offers up half of its bonus features if you put the movie into your computer. They also didn’t realize it would be a good idea to give people a Play Movie option on the main menu, instead requiring people to go into the Chapter Selections and clicking on Chapter 1. That’s the smell of professionalism right there.

The film itself kind of sucks, though it does get better as time goes on. It’s basically a fairly gentle slasher movie, played more for laughs than for violence. The story has an old farmer and his retarded pig-like son (I say pig-like not just because he’s fat, but because he oinks instead of talking) whose decrepit old slaughterhouse is being foreclosed to make way for a new modernized slaughterhouse that’s going to bring an extra hundred jobs to the community. Naturally this cannot stand, and so the old farmer instructs his son to murder the owner of the new slaughterhouse, his lawyer, and the sheriff for conspiring against him. The son also takes the opportunity to wipe out as many teenagers as he possibly can along the way.

The film is no great shakes, though there are enough nice moments to it to keep you from completely regretting watching it. The death scenes range from good (as when one character has his head crushed by the pig-boy’s hands) to retardedly bad (like when one girl is killed with a hatchet, and all we see is two spurts of red-colored water fly on a window), though we mostly don’t see anything. The humor works a bit better, as whenever the blatant Texas Chainsaw-ripoff family is onscreen they’re generally doing something amusing. The problem mainly comes during the fairly lengthy parts where neither of them is around. The numerous cuts to the police station, or the even more frequent bits with the teenagers as they go around town doing nothing of note and just doing a sad effort of padding it out to the full 90 minutes. The worst of this comes during the first third of the film, as after the opening throwaway deaths, we get nothing that’s not incredibly dull until we’re close to halfway through the movie. Still, I just can’t find it in me to really hate on a movie that has a mutant hillbilly stealing a cop car and hauling ass down some county back roads like he’s one of the Dukes of Hazzard. I just wish the rest of the movie could have been that good.

Rating: * ½