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Hello friends and enemies, ’tis I, your not so friendly Coroner ready to spill the bloody beans on more magical maniacal movies.  Yes I’ve been drinking again.  On March 31st, the After Dark Horrorfest kicked off it’s third installment of 8 Films to Die For and again, we’re here to provide coverage on them.  First up is the simply titled Slaughter, a film with an equally simple, yet seductive, cover.

Slaughter follows Faith, a cute young girl on the run from her abusive and obsessive boyfriend.  She befriends Lola, an outgoing partygirl with a penchant for finding trouble.  After Faith helps Lola out of a sticky situation, she offers her a favor, which Faith takes in the form of spending some time with her on the farm to duck her boyfriend, who has managed to find her new address and phone number.  Said to be based on a true story, any horror fan worth his salt knows that a secluded farm is anything but a safe haven.

Kills

While they’re slow to start and mostly boring, with several being off screen, the film does rack up a body count of about 8 deaths.

Ills

There is a drowning, a severed arm, some chunky human remains are fed to pigs, a throat is slit in a dream, there are some assorted guts, gunshot wounds, and some painful tooth extractions.

Lust

Weak as shit.  With a story about two cute girls, one of whom is supposedly seducing men all the time, there is only one lame sex scene and some tight clothing.  Let down.

Learning

Never trust relative strangers, don’t visit secluded farms, and never, ever go into the slaughterhouse.

Review

Slaughter has a good and interesting premise when you read the tagline, but ultimately the story is boring and uneventful.  The ending attempts to make up for this and nearly does, but the secret to a slow-burn big-explosive ending is that people have to stick around through the slow-burn.  It has to have some heat to it or people or liable to tune out or, in my case, have trouble staying awake.  As a good soldier, I kept snapping myself back to attention and rewinding to make sure as not to miss anything, only to frequently find that I hadn’t in fact missed anything, regardless of my rewinding skills or not.

At the climax, there are some spots of bad acting and a fight sequence that begs for a legitimate stunt coordinator and a few more rehearsals.  I do give credit to the filmmakers for the ending though.  Much like Knowing, it takes a reasonable amount of steel in your testicles to go that route.  Not much steel, though, as the ending could have really kicked it up another notch and got in your face and left you whimpering.  Instead, you find yourself thinking “man that could have been cool.”

All around the acting is, for the most part, extremely passable.  You won’t lose any sleep over the performances, but Amy Shiels (Faith) is definitely very cute and very nice to watch.  When it comes down to it, Slaughter is a bit too slow and lacks a little bit of power in its punches, leaving us with a movie that is okay and worth watching as part of the After Dark experience, but a flick that won’t bear repeat viewings.  Catch this only if your aim is to watch all of Horrorfest III or you’ve got literally nothing else to do for 90 minutes some night.

Feel free to discuss Slaughter and the After Dark Horrorfest below.