Review by Ben Bussey
Remember that time-honoured and rather fuddy-duddy-ish maxim, ‘red and green should never be seen’? Well, I think it’s safe to assume writer-director MJ Dixon doesn’t, or if he does he’s made a concerted effort to thumb his nose at that particular convention of good taste. This alone demonstrates the debt his first film owes to the golden age of 80s horror, in which lurid neon lighting was very much the order of the day; if it seems a bit tacky, I daresay that’s probably not an accident. From beginning to end, Slasher House hums with an almost radioactive red and green glow, revelling in the contrast of those tones, from the central protagonist’s pillar-box hair to the pallid, pissy tones of the walls in the mysterious, crumbling prison in which our heroine wakes up, stark bollock naked, to find herself incarcerated, with no memory of how she wound up there or why – or even who she is. As for how she’ll escape, what answers she will find, and what will happen in the interim – well, given the trashy 80s horror vibe, we can obviously expect a bit of the old ultraviolence.
As I’ve blathered on about at length before, there are many pros and cons to microbudget horror. As viewers, we are immediately required to enter into a specific mindset, and accept certain inevitabilities: it will look a bit like a home movie, the sound quality will be variable as will the performances, and the make-up effects and whatnot will demand a tad more suspension of disbelief than usual. Slasher House does not avoid any of those major pitfalls, and as such the temptation will be great to dismiss it offhand as bargain basement crap. However, as bargain hunting professionals will assure you, sometimes you find some good stuff hidden at the bottom of the barrel. Such is the case here. If you can get past the fact that it wears its microbudget status on its sleeve, you may find Slasher House to be a perfectly enjoyable bit of colourful, comic book-flavoured fun.
From the trailer I sensed a strong comic book vibe to Slasher House – vaguely reminiscent (not that I’m in any way suggesting it’s a rip-off) of Tim Seeley’s Hack/Slash – and this is every bit as much in evidence in the final film. Again, it’s a factor that requires a particular approach on the part of the viewer, as the action and the physicality of the characters will invariably have an exaggerated quality, and there will be a stilted, somewhat unnatural feel to the dialogue (watch the extras on the Blade 2 DVD – Guillermo del Toro explains it way better than I can). As we follow the enigmatic ‘Red’ (Eleanor James) through the quiet, mysterious house of horror and gradually get a sense of what’s going on, we have plenty of moments where it wouldn’t seem out of place for an exclamation mark or the words “WHAT THE -?” to suddenly pop up in a thought bubble over her head. Things only get more comic book-ish as we go on, once we meet a verbose psycho (the wonderfully named Wellington Grosvenor), a drooling killer clown (cover boy Andrew M. Greenwood), and a ruddy great wrestler type in a skull mask equipped with improbably oversized machetes (Alex Grimshaw). In case you hadn’t gathered yet, realism is not especially high on the agenda here.
However, whilst suspending disbelief may go some way to excusing certain quibbles, there were always going to be bigger issues with realising such a potentially cool high concept on a microbudget. When the central conceit is an abandoned prison populated with a small bunch of serial killing supervillains who must battle to the death, some great fight scenes and gore FX wouldn’t go amiss. Unfortunately, Slasher House does come up a bit short on these. While Dixon’s camerawork and editing capture the action just fine, what action there is a bit lacking in punch. Proceedings are also thrown off course every so often by a few rather gratuitous flashback cutaways, briefly taking us out of the prison to show the killers at work, none of which serves much purpose beyond boosting the running time and the body count. And even if we accept that performances in films of this nature will always be a bit stilted, Wellington Grosvenor’s over-talkative turn as Hannibal Lecter in a hunting cap is just a bit too stiff for my liking, whilst Adam Williams’ seemingly innocent and ineffectual Nathan also comes off just a little too feeble. (Credit where it’s due though – while it’s immediately apparent there must be more to that character than meets the eye, I must admit I didn’t see what was coming.)
Still, Eleanor James makes for a fairly charismatic lead. Her line delivery may again have that stiffness about it, but Dixon the screenwriter serves her quite well with some fairly witty one-liners. We might question the need for her to be nude when we meet her, given all the males are conspicuously clothed in their first appearances, but to be fair the scene is played more for sly comedy value than sleazy voyeurism, with strategically placed objects obscuring her naughty bits in much the style of Austin Powers. Either way, fans of the female bottom will have nothing to complain about. Nor, for that matter, will fans of 80s-style horror soundtracks, as the pulsating guitar and synth-fuelled score by Paul William Swindells is really quite something; honestly, it wouldn’t sound out of place in a big budget movie, and contributes immeasurably to the overall atmosphere. It’s another element that lifts Slasher House above the average for microbudget horror. Fans of the cheap, cheerful and cartoonish, dive on in; just remember my earlier words about entering the correct mindset.
Slasher House is released to Region 2 DVD on 29th April, from Safecracker Pictures.