Director – Matthew Goodhue, Screenplay – Bradley Fowler, Story – Bradley Fowler & Cady Lanigan, Producers – Mark David, Bradley Fowler & Cady Lanigan, Photography – Mark David, Music – Sam Ewing, Visual Effects – Digital Kraft, 4th Wall FX, Silo FX & Yorick Studios, Visual Effects Supervisors – Don McCoy & Ivan Pribicevic, Special Effects Supervisor – Muhamed M’Barek, Animatronics Designed and Created by Creature Effects Inc. (Supervisor – Marguerite Kalhor), Production Design – Nikola Bercek. Production Company – Renegade Studios Chicago/Cinema Relics Productions/Buffalo Speedway Film Co./Talking Wolf Productions.
Cast
Lisa Ambalavanar (Emily), Sydney Craven (Brianna Khinny), Olivia Rouyre (Madison), Bianca Beckles-Rose (Zenny), Tiff Stevenson (Ms. Mayflower), Andrew Horton (Tyler), Stefan Kapicic (Oliver), Sutter Nolan (Sarah), Milica Vrzic (Gabby)
Plot
Emily signs into the Sigma Lambda Zeta sorority house. The bitchy Brianna is running for house president, but Emily is set on becoming president like her mother was. While at the mall, Emily prevents a dog from being run over. The owner, the rare animal poacher Oliver, shows her pictures of his animals and gives her his card. Emily goes to visit Oliver, unaware that he has just been killed by a vicious sloth. She takes the sloth with her. Back at the sorority house, the sloth causes her to become the instant centre of attention. She able to mount a challenge to Brianna’s unopposed run for presidency where she announces that the sloth will be the sorority’s mascot, calling it Alpha. However, as the campaigning gets underway, Alpha begins killing people around the sorority.
Slotherhouse was the second film for US director Matthew Goodhue, who had previously made the horror film Woe (2020).
As Slotherhouse begins, you have sinking feelings about it. The sloth looks obviously like it is a puppet. The setting of a sorority house gives far-too-many impressions about being another slasher-alike film about sorority girls being killed, of which we have seen far too many – see the likes of The House on Sorority Row (1983) and Sorority House Massacre (1986). On the other hand, it is not too soon in before the film reveals it is not taking proceedings at all seriously.
The killer sloth and victim
We get the first indication of this not long in about the point where we see the sloth using a laptop to access Lisa Ambalavanar’s Instagram account and then spiking one girl’s drink with pills. Things get increasingly more (deliberately) ridiculous with images of the sloth lying around the sorority swimming pool drinking beer and using its nails to pop the cap; zipping one victim into a body bag and tossing them over the side of a bridge; heading off driving a luxury car while charting its progress via mapping apps; and posting its kills on social media.
Eventually, Slotherhouse finds a tone that is appealingly silly. Not the leave all sense that it is even taking anything that happens seriously tone of Sharknado (2013) and sequels but merely the amiably silly. It is quite well made from a professional standpoint. It achieves much by location shooting in Bulgaria, but you would have been unable to tell it wasn’t taking place in a US location. There is even quite a degree of sophistication to the sloth puppet, which is at times replaced by CGI.
