Slaughtered (2006)
Directed by: Kate Glover
Cast: Chloe Boreham, Christopher Tomkinson, Steven O’Donnell, Cassandra Swaby
Review by: Ben Bussey

It’s a typical enough night at a remote Australian pub. The regulars congregate to drown their sorrows, whilst the pretty young women and men working behind the bar struggle to keep their hands off one another. But, wouldn’t you know it, something is amiss. People keep disappearing suddenly, and subsequently showing up dead not long thereafter. Someone has clearly had enough of this binge drinking culture and has decided to do their bit to clean things up. Well, that or someone’s just gone homicidally insane. Either way, whoever it is has donned a black cloak and a freakish mask covered in spikes and broken glass, and seems determined to hack their way through everyone in the pub, customers and employees alike.

It sounds like a pretty bog standard formulaic slasher… and, funnily enough, it is. Now I have nothing against the standard slasher formula, as I think I have demonstrated in the past – I liked Sorority Row, for crying out loud – but more often than not it doesn’t hurt for the film to bring just a little something new, different or otherwise interesting to the table. A funny script, good visual aesthetics, or good old-fashioned inventive kills usually do the trick. Sad to say, Slaughtered utterly fails to do any of these things. As forgiving as I try to be toward first time filmmakers working on a microbudget (indeed, I’ve been accused of being too forgiving), my sympathies only stretch so far. If the story, the characters and the dialogue are not there, then everything’s going to come tumbling down like a house of cards, and Slaughtered does just that from the word go.

Writer/director Kate Glover has clearly taken a leaf out of Kevin Smith’s book by shooting at night in the pub and working there during the day. Alas, she does not have his ear for witty dialogue, nor is she able to structure her story in a remotely compelling way. Some efforts are clearly being made by the cast, and it is not for naught – Chloe Boorham makes for a decent final girl, for instance – and there are a few reasonably effective death scenes. The killer’s spiky visage is a nice touch, also. But the overall feeling of ‘been there, done that’ is just unavoidable. Slashers in general have their work cut out to avoid that repetitive feeling these days; those that are shot on muddy DV with poor sound, as this film is, need to work even harder to keep from testing audience patience. Slaughtered just isn’t up to the challenge, I’m afraid.

As the first of the two feature films showing at Ghouls On Film, this was naturally a bit of a let-down (though second feature Dead Hooker In A Trunk proved a bit more satisfactory). The event was all about celebrating the work of women in the horror industry, but Slaughtered demonstrates that a filmmaker’s gender can be of very little significance if the requisite creativity isn’t there. Be the writer/director male or female, experienced or inexperienced, well-financed or underfinanced – poor filmmaking is poor filmmaking.