As another academic year begins, the sisters at university sorority Sigma Lambda Theta are all a-flutter over rush week (whatever that is) and the election for this year’s sorority president; this is expected to be top mean girl Brianna (Sydney Craven) for the third year in a row. However Emily (Lisa Ambalavanar) longs to be popular too in this world where esteem is measured in social media likes and followers. Reasoning that people love interesting pets, she decides to adopt a three-toed sloth from a dodgy exotic animal importer (Stefan Kapicic) and bring it back to the sorority house. Unfortunately, no one realises until too late that the sloth, whom Emily and the others named Alpha, is a homicidal killing machine who doesn’t move all that slowly when she’s on a mission to slash with those gnarly knitting-needle-long claws. What’s more, Alpha can also drive, use a computer, and take her own selfies. OMG!
As the above might suggest, the very premise of this film is fantastically daft – so silly that one can only imagine that director Matthew Goodhue and writers Bradley Fowler and Cady Lanigan cooked up the idea while bingeing lord knows what infernal substance. Perhaps someone dared them to make a horror film with the most unlikely species they could think of, and after dismissing platypuses (already used in Phineas and Ferb), echidnas (Sonic the Hedgehog), and dwarf lemurs (Madagascar), they settled on sloths.
But beyond that one joke set-up and the title itself, Slotherhouse is sadly not that funny, even accounting for the fact that it has such a soft target in the American campus “Greek” system. A few more script drafts might have helped sharpen this into something a little more bitingly satirical, comparable to, say Black Sheep, a cracking little New Zealand comedy-horror film about mutant sheep from quite a few years back. Budget must have been tight, which is why the film is shot mostly in two or three locations in Serbia, and all the American sorority sisters are played by British actors. They, at least, deserve some credit – especially Ambalavanar, EastEnders veteran Craven and Bianca Beckles-Rose who gets to be the comic relief butch among the femmes – for screaming with such commitment and managing to keep a straight face throughout.
• Slotherhouse is released on 12 February on digital platforms.
