The Slaughterhouse Massacre
(*aka; Sickle)
(Buena Vista Region 1 NTSC DVD)
(2005)
review by Mickey Juice

If you only learn one thing from reading this review, let it be the following: When renting/buying a horror movie, don’t get sucked in by the cover artwork! If there’s a direct-to-video movie sitting on the shelf, with better-than-average cover artwork, then be very wary! I learned the hard way…

I think video stores should employ their own versions of Crazy Ralph from Friday the 13th. As soon as you go near the registers he looks at what you’re about to rent and says “Doomed! You’re all doomed!” Urging you to turn back and choose another title, thus saving you the pain of having to sit through garbage like Sickle.

Being a big (horror) movie fan I can usually find some sort of enjoyment in a movie, no matter how bad it is. Bad movies can usually turn out to be entertaining for all the wrong reasons. As long as there is at least some semblance of entertainment I can sit through pretty much anything. With this in mind I never thought I’d have a contender to put in the Hall of Shame™ here at HorrorView. Well, never say never! Once the credits were rolling on Sickle, I knew I had a sure-fire contender on my hands. From the cheesy acting to the clichéd storyline, this one was a stinker all the way. And no, it’s not in the class of ‘so bad it’s good’. It’s just bad!

The film starts off with a flashback from ’93. A teenage couple decide to have sex in the local slaughterhouse, mainly because the morbid girlfriend gets her kicks from it. During the deed, the both of them are killed by an unknown assailant. The locals later take an Elm Street like revenge on one of the slaughterhouse workers, Marty Sickle, who was accused of the murder.

Flash-forward about 10 years in the future and it’s the anniversary of Marty Sickle's death. After a rather lame party, a group of college kids decide to go to the slaughterhouse in an effort to scare their girlfriends. The obligatory stoner friend (unimaginatively called ‘Stoner’!) is required to tag along behind them and scare the girls by dressing in a Marty Sickle outfit.

After recanting a ‘Bloody Mary/Candyman’ type poem, the group unwittingly resurrect a poor man's Freddy Krueger by the name of Marty Sickle. Cue some awful death scenes and a final chase scene with the female heroine (wearing nothing but her lingerie) and it’s all over! Phew!

The movie sounds like, and is, the usual slasher fair that one would be expecting when renting this film. Hey we’ve all come to expect bad acting, bad dialogue, and clichés in our slasher films (that’s half the reason why we like them) but Sickle takes all of the above to new levels.

The pacing is one of the poorest areas of Sickle. A lot of the movie just crawls; they’re constantly setting up scenes for a non-existent plot. Once the guys and gals get to the slaughterhouse, they s.l.o.w.l.y wander about with a torch and a camera, trying scare each other and look in every room they come across. It’s rather painful to watch. This is compounded by the fact there aren’t any decent payoffs later in the movie with the death scenes.

This movie could have almost redeemed itself with some creative and well done deaths scenes. Having spent the entire budget on strippers for the earlier nude scenes I guess they didn’t have any money left for the gore effects. There were one too many paper Mâchè “Escape from Alcatraz” heads for my liking. Other than the awful effects, the editing and the camera speed cause the actual deaths to be all over in a split second. You can’t tell what’s going on half the time!

The video quality isn’t the best either, being very washed out; giving you the impression it was filmed on VHS. Most of the night scenes involving the stoner guy (who smokes pot for about 12 hours straight!) in his car were just scenes shot in the day and they’ve tweaked the brightness and contrast WAY too much, just to try and give the impression that it was night time.

During their initial investigations, the shmucks take a camera with them into the slaughterhouse to shoot their little adventure. The method of intercutting their camera footage with the movies film footage has the most potential for creating atmosphere and raising the tension levels. You can’t quite see what’s lurking off camera, similar to the web cameras in ‘My Little Eye’. Too bad the whole mood is ruined by camera artefacts and pixelisation! It was a wasted opportunity.

There is no improvement with the audio, as it’s is just as bad as the video! There was the odd self-composed song at the party and heard on the radio in the car, but other than that we get pretty much nothing in the way of a score. Not to mention the poor sound effects, some of which used more than once and usually at the wrong volume level. The flint in Stoners lighter is one such example.

There was some girl-on-girl action at the early party which was probably the highlight of the film, even though it was totally random and didn’t really fit in the college party scene. This turned out to be a double edged sword, as the only reason my mate and I kept watching was to see if there were more random lesbian scenes, but alas there wasn’t! Just like the cover artwork, it was put in there to sucker you in. Bastards! Although during the final chase scenes the heroine (somehow) managed to get down to her underwear, so there was some consolation there.

As far as extras go, fans of scene selections will be happy, as ‘scene selection’ is listed as one of the extras. As for the rest of us, there’s absolutely nothing, nudda. In the end this is probably a good thing! You don’t want your coasters to have too many extras on them.

The only satisfaction I can now derive from Sickle is seeing other people renting it. I just snicker to myself and think “poor bastards”. At least now if I see a bad movie with my friend, we’re both in agreeance that “At least it’s not as bad a Sickle!”

Sickle would have been fine for a first year film student’s project, cobbled together before the start of the year, so the teachers could then use it as a teaching aid in showing the class on what NOT to do! As far as a movie that’s been picked up for wide distribution on DVD, well, all I can say is HOW?! Bad acting, cliché script, bad presentation and the biggest detractor, really badly executed death scenes all point to the film being utter shite! Avoid at all costs!
Maybe next time I’ll check out Jack Frost 2…

* Note: The region 4 version of the movie is called ‘Sickle’, whereas the Region 1 version is called ‘The Slaughterhouse Massacre’. This might help you in avoiding this film.