Slotherhouse (2023) The very last credit on this horror-comedy reads something like....'No A.I. was used to make this film'.....
Really? Sure about that?
Because this movie feels even more computer-assembled than Hulu's fake teen monster-slasher "Carved" which we reviewed a few days ago.
This one has more than the usual delusions of adequacy. The filmmakers here aspired (or more often perspired to make a batshit crazy cult comedy that would live on as the movie to watch at midnight while consuming uncontrolled substances.
They wish. But they fell so far short of their goals, their film comes off as just plain stupid and even worse, contemptuous of its potential audience. It waves its idiocy around like a flag in the hopes people would think that's such a witty thing to do.
It's greatest sin.....the mind-numbing slow pace of its 93 minutes. Watching this became even more excruciating than the 3 & 1/2 hour running time of "Killers Of The Flower Moon"
Second greatest sin.....the bunch behind this film lacked the guts and nerve to take it into pure Krazytown delirium. They settled for making it a dumbass live-action cartoon, inviting only derision instead of real laughter.
Our supposedly sympathetic main character is Emily a college girl desperate for 'likes', so she's running for her Sorority's President against the resident Mean Girl. To pump up her popularity, Em illegally gets her hands on a three-toed tree sloth to entrance her Sorority sisters with its achingly huggable cuteness.
The female sloth, dubbed 'Alpha' and rendered by the puppetry crew as slightly more mobile than a stuffed Panda, is in reality a vicious two-faced sociopath. At any time, cooing, cuddlesome Alpha can transform herself in claw-shredding monster.
Thus comes the PG-13 rated kill scenes, suitable for tween girl slumber parties.....
Here's were the film goes only slightly off the rails but not nearly far enough. Alpha, it turns out, possesses fully human abilities, like scrolling through the internet, dropping roofies into drinks, taking selfies and somehow driving a car without legs long enough to reach the pedals. Yes, all that looks as stupid as it sounds, but the filmmakers miss every opportunity to raise it up from absurd dumbness to sheer madness.
And as if we couldn't have guessed already, Alpha's also as doggedly resilient as all the other standard horror slashers, absorbing multiple clubbings, stabbings and shootings yet still scare-jumping up for more.
With the exception of those previously mentioned little girl slumber parties, unfit for anyone else's consumption. 1/2 of a star and that's only for the winsome, Disney-fied, flute-and-chorus music that plays whenever Alpha's trying to win hearts......before impaling them. It's the one and only joke that works......
(1/2) star.
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