My Review of "Slaughterhouse Rulez"

Slaughterhouse Rulez blends a lot of familiar movies but I'm not sure if it melded quite as well as they were expecting. Still this is an enjoyable film to kill some time if you're looking for something to watch. In theory it should have worked really well but some of the scenes fell flat. Maybe it's because I've seen the scenes done better in other movies.

This movie starts out with the main character Don watching a recruitment video for a prestigious British boarding school called Slaughterhouse. His dad was an alumni of the school but sadly passed away. He reluctantly agrees to keep his mom happy. I guess he also went because he saw a girl in the brochure that caught his eye.

When he gets to the school he's paired with a roommate by the name of Willoughby. His roommate seems to be hiding all sorts of secrets. It's like all those college movies where the main character doesn't get along with their roommates right away. You know they're going to get along by the end of the movie.

Once the movie introduces Don to the rest of the school it sort of feels like a Harry Potter movie mixed with a generic high school movie. They talk about the hierarchy of the students at the school and separate everyone into different groups. I guess that's to be expected now that all teen movies based in school tend to follow this trend.

The way that the movie uses transitions and introductions to characters really reminds me of the Shaun of the Dead. To add to this fun Simon Pegg and Nick Frost from Shaun of the Dead are featured in this movie. I don't think that was by accident. There are actually a ton of stars in this movie. If you blink you might miss them.

As the film progresses there's talks about how fracking by the school is causing a disturbance. This sounds very familiar because I had just watched The Dead Don't Die not too long ago. That movie accused fracking of causing a zombie apocalypse. I naturally thought that zombies were going to come up from the dead.

There's great anticipation for what the fracking company is stirring up. Eventually a sinkhole is discovered and I guess this is the source of the problem. Again I said I guess that's what happened. At this point the story gets muddied up because there is a secret history to the school that gets revealed later in the movie.

At this point in the movie it starts to feel like a Goonies movie. Like I said before this movie has a tough time trying to figure out what it wants to be. There's so many elements added to this movie. In theory I know what they were trying to do but I think they tried to add too much to this movie and weren't able to amalgamate everything quite right.

Close to the climax of the story arc the movie starts to really get muddied because there's a definite change in direction for the movie that almost feels like it should be a totally different movie. I think there's a ton of great ideas in this movie but it's a little too ambitious. You can't fit that much into a 2 hour movie and expect your audience to absorb it all so easily.

Overall, I think there were some fun scenes in this movie but it never really excels in anything. It's not particularly hilarious and not really a horror movie either. I really wanted to like this one but it kind of ended up as a mediocre movie. I have to give this movie a 6 out of 10. I'll give them extra points for knowing what we'd like in this movie but ultimately it wasn't executed properly. Sadly I can't recommend this movie to my friends.