SLOTHERHOUSE is, arguably, the hardest kind of movie to make. No doubt Martin Scorsese, for example, had a tough time making GOODFELLAS, a true story about relatively recent events based on the account of an unreliable narrator and involving many still-living members of a criminal organization. Peter Jackson probably had a hell of a job ahead of him first condensing three huge novels into a manageable story for film and then pretty much mobilizing an entire small country to make a trilogy with LORD OF THE RINGS, directing massive armies of extras, many wearing prosthetic make-up. Sam Peckinpah somehow managed to wrangle an eternal classic out of THE WILD BUNCH, despite often being blackout drunk and consistently suffering from hemorrhoids while directing large crowds and big personalities, some of whom were active alcoholics and at least one of whom was an alleged murderer. So yeah, the argument is wide open to be made in all sorts of directions.
In contrast to those examples, SLOTHERHOUSE is a relatively small production, with no major stars and from the look of things, not even too much of an FX budget. But it aims to be a cult movie, and those are hard to come by in 2023. On the face of it, SLOTHERHOUSE looks like something in the style of SHARKNADO, a would-be cult classic that garnered lots of attention for its awesomely preposterous premise. There are people who love the SHARKNADO movies, which are made with tongue firmly in cheek, while others argue that aiming at cult status by definition guarantees failure. Cult status is something that can’t be manufactured, that argument goes; cult status can only be achieved naturally, with time. Personally, I’ve got no issue with the SHARKNADO phenomenon, since I always hope it leads enough people to genuinely weird stuff. But I’m also not that impressed with it. The part of this argument I tend to agree with is that cult classics are made with sincerity. When they go bad, it’s not because the filmmakers were goofing around. It’s because they took it so beautifully seriously. (See: BIRDEMIC.)
SLOTHERHOUSE is not a movie that was made with much seriousness. But goddamn if they didn’t pull it off anyway.
SLOTHERHOUSE is about a college student (Lisa Ambalavanar) who decides the route to becoming sorority president is social-media clout, and the quickest way to gather the popularity she needs is with the help of an adorable exotic animal. When Emily happens to meet a man whose business is exotic animals (Stefan Kapicic, from DEADPOOL and THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER), he hooks her up with a pygmy three-toed sloth from Panama that she decides to name “Alpha.” What Emily doesn’t know is that Alpha was illegally poached from Panama. And she didn’t see the opening sequence of the film, where Alpha is attacked by a crocodile and ends up slashing open its underbelly with her claws, establishing her lethal supremacy.
Also, she’s not an insane movie freak like me, so she doesn’t immediately get suspicious of Alpha due to her ominous resemblance to Van Damme in UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: DAY OF RECKONING (2012).
Emily brings Alpha to the sorority house, where they both quickly win over most of the other young women, gaining an enemy in head mean-girl Brianna (Sydney Craven) and concerning Emily’s human BFF Madison (Olivia Rouyre), who sensibly points out that Alpha is part of an endangered species and belongs in her natural habitat. But Emily becomes addicted to winning, so much that she doesn’t notice how her sorority sisters quickly begin disappearing.
This is a movie about a killer sloth. That doesn’t require a spoiler warning. It’s on the poster. However, there is something that probably warrants a
SPOILER WARNING
and that is only because I would like you to be able to go into this movie the way that I went into it, which was knowing full well that this was a movie about a killer sloth, but not knowing that the killer sloth is played by
SPOILER WARNING
a puppet.
I cannot possibly emphasize enough how much joy this brought me. It was the perfect creative choice. SLOTHERHOUSE is smart, fun filmmaking from top to bottom. The script by Bradley Fowler, from a story by Fowler and Cady Lanigan, gives you characters that are likable and some genuinely great gags. The direction by Matthew Goodhue is expertly framed and paced, revealing Alpha at all the exact right moments, knowing precisely how to spring that damn sloth towards the human actors and when. Whose idea was to make Alpha a puppet? Where do I send the flowers?
Genre-film fans in general, and horror fans in particular, often make the case that practical effects outdo CGI every time. There absolutely are differences in the effect on an audience when the unusual creation we’re meant to fear is tactile to the actors onscreen. No matter how immaculate the computer effects are, somehow we the audience can always tell when actors are interacting with something tangible. That’s not to say that computer-abetted horror films can’t be effective. There are plenty of examples of films that show us unnatural sights using CGI that could never be achieved practically. I’m not a Luddite. But I am absolutely here to tell you that in a scene where a young woman enters a bathroom, unclothed and vulnerable, and starts to suspect a malignant presence, and she throws open the shower curtain to reveal a killer sloth, it is 100,000% fucking funnier that the killer sloth is a puppet.
A movie about a killer sloth is never going to attempt to be genuinely scary. Sloths are not by any stretch of the imagination dangerous to human beings. Read about sloths for even a minute and one begins to wonder, speaking in terms of Darwin, how sloths as a species have endured this long. The filmmakers hit on the concept and brilliantly knew precisely how to wield it. No, SLOTHERHOUSE isn’t a scary movie, but if it was just an hour-and-a-half of a sloth puppet being flung at the camera, it would not be as enjoyable as it is. (It would still be enjoyable, to me, but I’m a weirdo.) The whole crew understood the assignment, from Mark David’s poppy cinematography to Sam Ewing’s surprisingly — and hilariously — sweeping score, from the creative set-ups of every sloth kill, imagined by the writers and choreographed by the director, to the immaculate editing by Mike Mendez, who is a tremendously talented genre director in his own right.
The cast, largely unknown to me before now, is tremendously game. Lisa Ambalavanar is likable and upbeat in the lead role, and she creates lovely onscreen friendships with both Olivia Rouyre as her best human friend, and with the Alpha puppet. There is possible subtext to the fact that Emily is the one non-white face that really registers in a house full of Karens-in-training, but to its credit, the movie doesn’t dwell there. The casting says all that needs to be said. Credit goes also to Tiff Stevenson as Miss Mayflower, the house mother who isn’t over her bygone sorority days, and to Sydney Craven as the hissable human villain.
An entire paragraph needs to be reserved for Bianca Beckles-Rose, a British-born actor who delivers a performance that is truly and indelibly bizarre. It really is an accomplishment in a movie called SLOTHERHOUSE to leap out of all the sloth business with such distinctive strangeness of pitch and syntax. The only thing I can compare it off-hand to would be SUCCESSION‘s Fisher Stevens in MY SCIENCE PROJECT (1985), a performance so outside the movie it’s in that it nearly torpedoes it all.
But nothing can torpedo SLOTHERHOUSE. It’s unsinkable, just a pure delight that didn’t need to work even half as well as it does to be a treat. But it’s even more enjoyable than its premise and its marquee “monster.” It’s a neo-cult-classic joy-booger that I dearly hope finds its midnight audience. Forgive me for channeling Gene Shalit and slinging a species-appropriate pun, but SLOTHERHOUSE is a terrific hang.
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Tags: 31 flavors of horror, Andrew Horton, Animals, Animals Attack!, Annamaria Serda, Bianca Beckles-Rose, Bradley Fowler, Cady Lanigan, Grace Patterson, Gravitas Ventures, Horror, Kelly Lynn Reiter, Lisa Ambalavanar, Mark David, Matthew Goodhue, Mike Mendez, Milica Vrzi?, Olivia Rouyre, Rudi Rok, Sam Ewing, Sloths, Stefan Kapi?i?, Sutter Nolan, Sydney Craven, Tiff Stevenson
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