Slotherhouse

 

This is a film that is completely ridiculous and stupid to boot. The idea of a killer sloth is a funny premise from the get go, so it is not too hard to figure out that this is a comedy, disguised as a horror film. If you took all the clever parts of this year's earlier film "Megan", with its animatronic doll killer, and replaced them with a stuffed puppet of a sloth that is never convincing, you would get the joke immediately. The film makers here are having a lark and they know that there is nothing remotely legitimate about their film story. So they lean into the stupidity and have some fun, and that ends up working. 

"Slotherhouse" is a pun that gets a groan in the film, and it is the kind of joke you will see repeatedly if you catch this movie. "Alpha" the sloth, becomes an internet sensation at the sorority house where she ends up. There are parodies of all the social media tropes now present in the culture. They even laugh at the idea that an "influencer" gets paid for doing nothing but spouting off. That story line gets mixed with a sorority mean girls plot and thus you have the movie. There are nods to other horror films as well, so maybe you can see it an an homage. 

How this got rated PG-13 is not clear. There is no bad language, no nudity, virtually no blood, and all of the violence happens off screen except for the climax, which is no worse than most Saturday cartoon. It is not at all scary, although the director knows all the shots that need to be copied from a slasher film, but then uses the jump scares for laughs instead. In the end, it succeeded in entertaining me. I laughed a lot during the film. Most of the time I was laughing at how stupid everything happening is. I think the script and director know that and they just let the chips fall where they will. 

In all fairness, I enjoyed this movie much more than "Barbie" or "Cocaine Bear", although both of those are far superior to it. This is one of those movies you laugh at, not with, but in this case the film makers know that this is going to be the result. How else can you explain a sloth that learns how to use social media to spread the word about it's own murderous ways? When Alpha makes her way to the hospital, you know at that point that the story is completely designed like a sketch, this is an SNL moment that is better than most of the stuff on SNL itself.

I can't recommend the film to you, it is not good. I will tell you however that if you do watch it, you will laugh a lot. So, you decide how to take that. It's entertaining and funny, but at the expense of any story. #killerslth, #housesloth, #whatthehellgoseeit.