Slaughterhouse Rulez review: Pegg and Frost's boarding school gorefest could try harder
Dir: Crispian Mills. Cast: Simon Pegg, Michael Sheen, Asa Butterfield, Finn Cole, Nick Frost, Kit Connor, Hermione Corfield, Jamie Blackley. 15 cert, 104 mins
Monsters invade an elite boarding school in Slaughterhouse Rulez, a pushy horror comedy which either has one too many zs in the title or several too few, depending on your point of view. Slithery reptilian things unleashed by a nefarious fracking operation on the school groundz, they crawl from the sewers to attack students and faculty alike.
The film, hatched by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s production company, might have done better to locate its threat internally, as Robert Rodriguez’s US-based The Faculty, an underrated hoot, did back in 1998. Heaven knows, there’s plenty of scary potential in the cobwebby and sadistic rites of Etonian legend.
Vampire headmasters have been done before, true, but it might have been fun to see Michael Sheen, in full hammy Molesworthian mode, have a stab at this, rather than drawling inconsequentially about his pet dog, Mr Chips.
All the archetypes of that satirical Ronald Searle tradition are ticked off. In the younger cast, there’s a Neo-Nazi of a peroxide prefect (Jamie Harries), Asa Butterfield as an openly gay one with the wit to shut his bullies up, and so on. Finn Cole’s likable hero, Don, is a Northern lad only enrolling to please his mum and see what the girls are like: more sketchily written than anyone else, is the answer.
The actress playing the main one is literally called Hermione, and the set-up essentially feels like Harry Potter and the Secret Fracking in the Woods, a throwaway instalment you probably forgot in the middle of the series.
Pegg, meanwhile, has a generously showcased role as a neurotic housemaster called – wait for it – Meredith Houseman. He has evidently called in a favour from Margot Robbie, his co-star in this year’s Terminal, playing a just-scarpered girlfriend who appears on Skype chat from her new post doing something or other at an African field hospital.
These scenes just kind of sit there, enabling Pegg to blub tragically in a cricket sweater while sinking red wine. He’s companionable enough, but love-ins with his famous mates aren’t much of a fillip to the film, which isn’t in danger of maxing out on the laughs or scares in a hurry.
The gore ramps up in the last act, with predictably blatant borrowings from Shaun of the Dead, as our dwindling survivors huddle in the school basement and do what they can in the hectic, choppy circumstances.
Director Crispian Mills, the controversial one-time frontman of Kula Shaker who directed Pegg to genuinely unbearable effect in A Fantastic Fear of Everything, thinks gallons of entrails and major cast beheadings are here to rescue him, but these full-on tactics have the opposite effect, playing as try-hard sops to horror fans who aren’t this easily satiated.
Early on, there are stray flashes of the class-savvy romp this script wanted to be, but they’re drowned out by gag after jolt after obvious gag and jolt. The school isn’t specific enough and the horror isn’t weird enough: on both fronts, it’s so broad it could practically be a Norfolk waterway.
