By 1987, the slasher genre was starting to eat itself alive with derivative copycats and endless sequels, and while this manic canibalistic phase produced some true classics, it also burped up Slaughterhouse Rock.
This is a movie that desperately wanted to be on the same shelf as A Nightmare on Elm Street. It invested in all the right smoke machines and coloured lighting gels, the cast was properly photogenic, they caught the whole MTV aesthetic – but it just couldn’t nail down a tone. It came across as having been made by people who don’t like, or understand horror films – like they just rented a handful of recent popular titles and watched them on fast-forward to get the gist. So the focus definitely leans on style over substance, and camp over scares, but it still does its damndest to entertain. It tries so very, very hard.
Casting Toni Basil (who was just shy of forty when Mickey hit in ‘82) and throwing Devo (respect to Mark Mothersbaugh) on the soundtrack was obviously an attempt at giving the film some rock cred, but by 1987, this just felt weirdly anachronistic, especially given its target audience of switched-on kewl youths. The whole thing looks and feels like a metal video, but aside from the awesome poster, there’s isn’t much to head bang to. That said, I’m always prepared to give it a tacit nod of approval.
Even with all its half-baked ideas and story beat whiplash, it’s hard not to have fun watching this tone-deaf mess unfold. It’s best enjoyed with a few buds and a brewski. It might not sit with the decade’s a-listers, but it deserves some space on the shelf next to Night of the Demons and Slumber Party Massacre II.