Slaughterhouse Rulez (2018)
(On Cable TV, October 2019) So there’s a boarding school and then monsters attack the boarding school and that’s all you really need to know about Slaughterhouse Rulez, isn’t it? Sure, you can add complications and plot justifications such as fracking causing the monsters to rise to the surface and attack a school where misfit protagonists are bullied by upper-crust antagonists, but we all know where it’s going to end: With most of our heroes alive, all the bullies dead, and the school spectacularly blown up. I’m really not spoiling anything here, so closely does the film follow the usual arc of just about any comparable B-movie. Of course, the devil is in the detail and this is where Slaughterhouse Rulez does a bit better: small character touches and the presence of three capable adult actors (Michael Sheen as a tyrannical headmaster, but also Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in likable supporting roles) round out a young cast. The stereotypes are rampant (of course, the head bully is a rich blond guy) and the sequences are familiar, but it’s part of the charm of the film to go through the expected paces at a predictable speed. Of course, this means that there’s little left to discover once you’ve figured out where it’s going. Whether this is good or bad for Slaughterhouse Rulez will depend on your mood at the time: there’s a time and place even for a lighthearted monster movie that does everything by the numbers, and that may be this evening. I’ve seen much worse … but then again, I’ve seen much better as well.