Slaughterhouse Rulez

Boarding school. Can you think of anything worse? Holed up with a bunch of rich toffs who look down on everyone. The fact that the places are notorious hotbeds of bullying and abuse. Realising that your parents can't stand the sight of you and shipped you off so they don't have to look at you. Having to live in the place where you are made learn. Jesus, I dunno. They're like prisons for kids. Slaughterhouse Rulez is set in one and confirms all my suspicions about them. Right down to the monsters.

Don gets a once in a lifetime chance to be educated in the illustrious Slaughterhouse private school. He has no interest in being surrounded by Britain's young elite but his mother is having none of his protestations. Soon enough he finds himself feeling very out of place and rooming with the equally outcast Willoughby.  Meanwhile to keep the school in the black financially, the headmaster has started to allow fracking on school grounds. Noxious fumes are rising all over the grounds but they are the least dangerous thing that has been stirred up.

I wasn't the biggest fan of this. It has it's moments but its the kind of film you watch and smile at but an hour after it's over it will dissipate from your brain and you'll never think of it again until you see it advertised on film4 sometime in the future. It's a comedy horror that's not particularly funny or scary. It's messy and contains subplots of a serious nature that jar terribly with the plotline around them. Oddly for a horror, the best parts of the film happen during the scene setting, the moments where we get to know our cast. We get a look into the strange machinations and hierarchies of boarding school life. Where older students know as Gods get to rule over their charges with an iron fist. The headboy is the uber teutonic looking Clegg and he's scarier than any of the horror stuff that rears it's head in the second half of the film. A homophobic racist snobby prick who's main pleasure in life is torturing all around him. Most of the laughs appear in the first half too courtesy of the absurdities of boarding school life. Well I say most of the laughs but there aren't very many at all. 

Back in 1996 Buffy The Vampire Slayer showed us that school was actually hell. It's monster stories were metaphors for the problems faced daily by teenagers trying to survive high school. This film tries the same tact but it doesn't work here. Ya it's gory and it's evil things are nasty but stories like this only work if you care enough about the characters onscreen to feel tension and you won't here. It's why a lot horror films fail to connect on an emotional level. We just don't get enough time to feel anything for them and instead get splattered in blood and guts as if that's going to compensate. And if you come to this just looking for a good time you won't get much of that either. It's frequent longueurs will have you checking your watch a lot.

Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are rolled out in the roles of a lovelorn housemaster pining after his girlfriend who's abandoned him and a stoner eco warrior objecting to the fracking. One can only assume they were hired to attract cinema audiences who loved Shaun Of The Dead. Here they are wasted and their appearances only serve to remind you of better films. Pegg in particular is so weedy and whingy you'll relish seeing him suffer. Finn Cole and Asa Butterfield as Don and Willoughby do better. Marginally. Don is a solid lead and Willoughby's story gives the film a touch of depth it doesn't deserve. It's his story that jars with the rest of the film though and it one scene makes for uncomfortable viewing. And not in a fun way.

Don't bother paying for this. Wait for TV or Netflix. You aren't missing anything. It's a film designed to make a few bob at Halloween and that's all.