The Slaughter

2006

"A female demon hell-bent for revenge"

Getting your female demons bent by hell is so predictable, and so overpriced. It's like getting your car repairs done at an authorized dealership. Lucifer is like Mr. Badwench. Personally, I get all of my female demons bent by a local chop shop over in the warehouse district. OK, sometimes Manuel doesn't use genuine parts, but he does the job just as well as Satan, and at half the price.

You may have noticed that I've given up on reviewing crappy genre movies unless they are hot off the presses. This might lead you to ask why I'm looking at the previous work of a director who has three more recent films to ridicule. Fair enough. The reason is that it's from the writer/director of Zombie Strippers, which I watched last week. While I didn't find Zombie Strippers to be a classic of either gorotica or horror/comedy, I was impressed by its high energy level and its unabashedly depraved sense of humor, so I wondered whether those characteristics had been prominent in the auteur's previous offerings, and I picked up a used copy of The Slaughter for five bucks from Amazon Marketplace.

The answer to my question about his previous efforts, at least as it relates to The Slaughter is "yes and no." The Slaughter is an odd one. For about the first half of the film the script seems to be taking itself seriously, which is to say you may find it funny, but you will not know whether it was meant to be. If the author's tongue was in his cheek, he never cracked a smile to let us in on the joke. In the beginning it seems like one of those films which is funny only in the sense that the MST 3000 guys would have a ball making fun of it, although they probably would have to find a new network to do so, since the first three minutes of the film consists of non-stop female nudity. But then, about halfway through the film, there is an abrupt tone shift, and the film becomes deliberately jokey, silly and self-referential, indicating that it is not a bad rip-off of Evil Dead and Night of the Demons, but rather a comic riff on those films. The experience of watching this film is like watching 40 minutes of Manos, the Hands of Fate followed by 40 minutes of Scream. Is it a laughably bad horror movie or a movie which winks at you as it laughs at bad horror movies? Depends on which half you watch.

Of course, after I watched the second half, I realized that the first half must also have been intended as genre spoofery, but it had kept a straight face about the satire until later in the film, when it finally decided to nudge my arm and say, "Just kidding, dude."

Lots of bad horror films begin with a prologue situated in the past, so this one begins with two such prefatory scenes. It begins around the year 1900, when a witches' coven gets nekkid to summon a nekkid female demon.  Then, some sixty years later, the unleashed demon forces a mother to kill her young daughter in a gothic mansion. The present-day story begins when a sleazy real estate agent hires a group of entrepreneurial college students to clean up the same mansion, which has been now neglected for forty years. The annoying student stereotypes take on the roles that The Bowery Boys or Abbott and Costello would have occupied in the horror comedies of yore, the everyday losers who are still arguing about mundane matters despite being in the presence of ancient evil. As they start housecleaning, the kids stumble upon an ancient book of magic, and one of the clueless twerps soon starts reading aloud from the book. Bad idea, as you might imagine.

Of course the one horror movie rule more important than "don't read aloud from the book made of human flesh" is "the kids who have sex die first," so you can guess what will happen next, what the consequences will be, and that the house's resident demons must be somehow related to the twin prologues.

You've probably realized by now that I can't really rip on the film for making the kids annoying and stereotypical, because that's all part of the joke. In that sense, the film is virtually immune to criticism since the author has intentionally created trite characters and situations to lampoon the genre. If you ridicule his material, well, dammit, you just don't get the joke. I'm pretty sure I got the joke, and I did laugh once in a while, but I don't think the film was entertaining enough to sustain it at feature length.

Film clips:

• Adraina Esquivel and others. Adriana gets totally naked as the female demon. The topless witches are: Elana Blank, Jessica Elder, Ellyn Daniels, Jessica Harbeck, Kristen Karvouni, Jennifer Salvucci, Tiffany Tejeda, Sasha Yates, Tiffany Hayden and (surprisingly enough) Judi Dench. OK, I'm kidding about Dench. As for the witches, I have no idea which witch is which.

• Laura Stein, aka Laura Bach, aka Harry Reasoner Jr. Maybe I made up the last alias. Cute rear view, but she needs to turn around.

 

Zombie Strippers

2008

Another look at "Zombie Strippers!" but without the scenes after the girls turn into zombies. Yuk !

Jenna Jameson shows it all working the pole.

Shamron Moore also gives it all up on stage.

"Tiny Tots" only from Roxy Saint.

Pics

Christina Aguilera, naked and pregnant in Marie Claire

More crazy pics of Eva Mendes from Vogue Italia

Tara Reid on Miami Beach: nice rear view

Tomiko Martinez as a victim on Dexter

Missy Pyle in American Crude

Jennifer Lopez in the full-screen version of The Money Train

These higher-definition caps of Mila Kinis in Boot Camp are disappointing. They show that her breasts have either been covered with a patch, or digitally blurred. Perhaps both.

Finally, several woman from Perfume: Story of a Murderer

Jessica Schwarz

Karoline Herfurth

Rachel Hurd

Sara Forestier

Film Clips

Susan George in The House Where Evil Dwells. Well, Evil did dwell there back in the 80s, but it moved out when Dick Cheney bought the place. Even pure, unadulterated Evil has some standards.

Keeley Hawes in Karaoke, a rarely seen 1996 miniseries from BBC. I've never seen this clip before.

Hillary Duff in War Inc. The bad news: very big download, no nudity. The good news: it's still worth watching. It's very sexy stuff, and The Duffer is now quite a big star in both the film and music worlds, although she has not yet turned 21. She's also very easy on the eyes.