Given that this was billed as the 'B' picture to 'Hard Rock Zombies' on Vinegar Syndromes (fairly) recent Bluray release, I had assumed that 'Slaughterhouse Rock' was going to be a nother muscially tangental horror movie (I was thinking the title was a play on 'Jailhouse Rock') and that I might have been looking at something in the vein of 'Slumber Party Massacre 2' A.K.A a slasher movie with random musical numbers. Taht is not the case.
'Slaughterhouse Rock' is ACTUALLY a pretty generic little supernatural slasher movie about a group of friends who travel to an isolated island prison/experimentation center? Im not 100% sure, I dont recall the film clarifying it as anything other than the final resting place of a supernatural spirit who was abandoned on the 'rock' centuries prior for his ritualistic, cannibalistic, BDSM torture and murder fantasies.
And...thats pretty much all this film is, a mysterious woman turns up around 20 minutes in after one of our guys has recurring nightmares of torture and dabauchery to explain that they're stemming from the muderous spirit who lives on the rock. they all travel to the rock, and slowly they all get brutalized, possessed and whittled down.
Its not the most inventive story out there (Night of the Demon more or less ran this exact plot 8 years prior). But it didnt do enough to actively make me dislike it as a picture.
On the script front, its a bit hard going, the opening half is incredibly slow and the action doesnt really pick up until the last third or so of the movie. before that, its kind of doing a 'nightmare on elm street' kind of Schtick, where your not sure whats a dream and whats real. the characters are all pretty under developed (basically just swaggering 80s charicatures for lack of a better descriptive) and most of the front half is pretty much just spent establishing who the couples are, establishing the nightmare sequences, and setting up the main villain for the piece.
Once it does get going in that final third, its great! with some nice visual effects, a couple cool kills and it really picks up the pace, but it comes too late and ends too soon for me to really properly take it omn board.
The direction and cine for this piece are fine enough, its a little on the generic side truthfully for this kind of picture. It feels very much like a production going through the motions, and barring a few scenes that mix water and electricity. It feels very much like this was just shot to standard, tinted blue to try and mask the lack of visual identity and shovelled out as quickly as possible, not because they believed it would fly, but because they knew they could make money back on the video rental market.
Compositions are pretty bland, the edit is a little inconsistent, and I found myself a couple of times a little confused as to exactly what was going on and who was supposed to be doing what.
The soundtracks rocky, but fairly forgettable and the cast dont really do enough to land an impression for me truthfully.
Has 'Slaughterhouse Rock' been released 5 years prior, it could have been considered a solid piece of work that introduced new things to a genre that was already on the up and up. But this came out in 1988...and it feels sooo....SOOOOOO DONE by this point. Its a largely unoriginal production, that would probably do a decent enough job as 'filler' in between two other better movies. Its not inherently bad, but this one really is the definition of 'Refilling the snackbar and hitting the bathroom while it plays in the background' fodder.
source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/slaughterhouse-rock/
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