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The Slaughter (2006)

Dir: Jay Lee

The turn of the century America.
Some sexy, naked, witchy chicks hold a ritual to raise an all-powerful She-Demon which goes horribly wrong and leaves said Demon dormant, but in our realm.

Sixty years later a couple and their young daughter move into a house built on the site of the ritual. The power of the Demon takes hold of the mother and makes her spill her daughter’s virgin blood to move the ritual on one more step…Tis a complex and drawn out business this ritual business, okay?!

4 years later, the present, six college students are hired to clean up the beastly house for a mean Real Estate guy, who plans to sell it for lots o‘ bucks.
Whilst arguing and vacuuming the students uncover the essential ‘ancient book of the She-Demon making ritual thingy bound in Human skin’ buried in the cellar (Sam Raimi got shares in this?) and then unwittingly do silly things to finish the ritual and make the Demon all-powerful….

 

Opening in a manner that can only be described as utterly delightful for all those wrong reasons that feel so damn right (synchronised breast baring, manic blood-spattering knife abuse, crimson covered nakedness, snarling busty She-Demons, nipple hugging nighties, hacked up kiddies and undignified death by hat-stand) it seems that, in their crazy, cliché hugging, naughty boy, gratuitous way, the makers of this low budget opus certainly know their stuff and have the basic technical skills to carry it out (for example the sequence with the mother and daughter is shot almost in black and white except for when the brief lightning flashes outside zap it with colour) , after this rather groovy opening though the film relies on lots of highly theatrical comedy chat between the highly theatrical characters (with the odd ‘weird’ moment thrown in to remind us we are not watching “Dawson’s Creek” with swearing and titties) and some less than wonderful technical aspects also raise their unwelcome head.
But along the way we still have a lot to entertain.

Acting varies from the fun and functional to the rather damn bad and annoying (of the two lead characters for example mock socialist rebel Iggy is well essayed by Zak Kilberg, whereas his brother’s girlfriend Dana is badly played by, the otherwise cute as all hell, Jessica Custodio) but all in all the good performances outweigh the bad/bland ones which helps no end when the next 30 minutes are spent with their characters moaning, shouting and joking with each other.
Also worth a mention I have to say is Brad Milne who turns in a fun performance as the hysterically nasty Real Estate guy, chomping on a huge Cuban cigar, who would be thrown out of the cast of a Victorian gothic melodrama being directed by Tod Slaughter for being too over the top!

This dialogue heavy section could still have been a chore though if not for the sheer over the top melodramatics of it all which thankfully means that, although we do start to look at the clock as the 40 minute mark comes around, more fun has been had with these people than we would normally have any right to have had.
Director/writer Jay Lee knows we’ve seen all this before and soplays around with the film’s hoary old basic set-up as you would expect, but crucially he lets us know he’s playing.
“The Slaughter” is basically not trying to be anything above its station…that of a fan-made, low budget homage stuffed with dialogue and characters as comic book as it’s demonic shenanigans.

By rights I should have hated the genre-scavenging dialogue, the argumentative characters and the unlikely actions and attitudes shown to what was going on, but it’s credit to all involved that a grumpy old ‘duder’/American teen hating old English bastard like myself actually enjoyed it.
Although saying that some of Dana’s ‘comedic’ outbursts during the finale certainly stretched my patience to breaking point.
*GRRRR*
And this is not good for the finale actually as it’s mostly a semi-comedic verbal catfight between Dana (with Custodio in full ‘I can’t really act and I’m being made to say annoying things’ mode) and the She-Demon.

Lee deftly has his film show it’s pastiche hand in full when Iggy starts his delightfully melodramatic and cliché-ridden ‘we are all doomed and the ritual of blood and ancient evil has been set in motion’ speech filled with references from ’The Da Vinci Code’, HP Love craft and any 80‘s demon flick you can name (all of which the other characters seem to simply take on board as easily as if he simply announced that Monday follows Sunday) and as such the film can now get away with being a cut ‘n’ paste job because it’s now officially and obviously a homage you see.
Crafty.
Some of the horror genre in-jokes are unsubtle to the point of eye-rolling but even then genuinely funny moments are mined from them (like a ‘safety first’ discussion on whether a zombie they plan to attack is a lumbering ‘Romero one’ or one of the newer “super fit sport zombies”).
It’s at this point in fact that the film turns into an out and out comedy for the most part, but even then it did manage to make this jaded old horror warhorse jump in surprise.

The gore scenes are rather spread out and certainly wallow in their low budget origins, but they are fun, messy and above all avoid Sega mega drive level CGI blood decoration, though a bit of computer visual trickery is effectively used to pull off an otherwise old school decapitation that allows the actor’s face to stay in shot (and indeed talk) as the head is cut off. A method pushed to it’s groovy limits in Tim Burton's “Sleepy Hollow” of course.
Some of the more obvious gore/visual in-jokes are a straight-up take-off of the still twitching body parts shot so beloved in “The Evil Dead” (that has the nice addition of a crawling hand to homage “Evil Dead 2” at the same time), a “City of the Living Dead” style gut vomiting sequence that would have pleased Lucio Fulci no end as it clones his bad taste grue but lacks his artful presentation and a back-lit shot of the She-Demon and her Undead groupies that brings back memories of the finale to Carpenter’s “The Fog”…red eyes and all.
And if Iggy doesn’t turn into poor man’s surrogate Ash during the finale I’m a monkey’s Uncle (I’m not honest, it’s just the way a walk).
Sure, it’s lazy perhaps but it’s still amusing and obviously done with affection so I forgive them.

The She-Demon looks great and silly at the same time and only the fact they foolishly chose an actress (Adriana Esquivel) obviously unwilling to bare all (demon panties?!) lets the overall effect down.
Elsewhere the overuse of juddering and rather bad rotoscoping pains the eyes as does some dubious blue/green screen work.
Overall though the on set make-up effects and gore FX are at least well done and enjoyable.
Nudity is thrown in now and again (away from the opening sequence) at strategic moments throughout the film and when it’s not Jay Lee’s camera (yes, he shot this as well as writing, directing and editing it) looms up from the floor and oggles the actresses breasts with schoolboy relish.

But despite these positive points the final few minutes with the She-Demon, like the rest of the plot, make little sense at first unless you wind the thing back and listen to the badly recorded dialogue a few times, whereupon an eventual ray of understanding light does manage to break through the clouds of ‘huh?‘
In fact confused and/or unsatisfying endings seem to be the norm nowadays in many genres, not just horror and as mentioned, after the gory lead-up, this finale does come down to not much more than badly delivered comedy one-liners that fall flat.
Which is a shame as up until that point the film had delivered far more enjoyment than I thought it ever could or would.
So not an essential watch, but certainly worth it if you happen to come across it as there is some good, solid genre homage going on here with some fun gore here and there and a doozy of an opening.