Movie Review: The Slashening

@lcfremont braves The Slashening…

From the same group that brought us the delightfully funny Fear Town USA comes The Slashening. In case you are unfamiliar with my thoughts on Fear Town USA (review here), I was immediately in love with it and that feeling lasted all the way through to the end credits. Maintaining an in the know, tongue in cheek tone without going over the top or exhausting the schtick is a very delicate dance and this group excelled at it in Fear Town USA. Unfortunately, I just can’t say the same for The Slashening.

Once again, using generic horror tropes to poke fun at the genre, pop culture and just human nature in general, there are some genuinely funny moments, but this film seems to suffer from milking a joke for all it’s worth to the point where it just feels tiresome. Perhaps the best example of this is the token coke snorting girl. She’s funny in the early part of the movie, but then it just keeps going. It starts at an American Psycho level of humor and then devolves into a Less Than Zero feeling of, “stop snorting coke!” It was this feeling of overusing the bit that made her death feel more of a relief than an epic comedy exclamation point.

Also trampled to death was the two BFF’s who sing along to a parody of a Taylor Swift song. Initially, it’s really funny and then they just keep driving and singing along to terrible pop songs. Later, after their requisite girl fight, they sing the anti Taylor Swift song again and it just feels overused, much like the cocaine party girl. Strangely, the normally irritating slut character remains funny most of the movie. Just like the previous characters, her joke is stretched pretty thin, but the absolute dedication and blase attitude of the actress is hilarious. She just talks about threesomes the same way you talk about getting a manicure.

Add in the neurotic host of the overnight gathering, the nosy next door neighbors and the mandatory creeper hoping to get a glimpse of naked girls having a pillow fight and you’ve seen this movie a million times over. Our creeper even wears a bag over his head in the spirit of O.G. Jason Voorhees which was a nice touch.

As someone who is also afflicted with an allergy to loud noises, I appreciated the nosy neighbors and their banter was spot on. There is certainly no shortage of comedic talent in this film and the way they embrace their ultra low budget effects is really endearing and adds an extra layer of comedy. The score and the original parody songs are all fantastic and definitely characters in their own right. In fact, all of the ingredients of The Slashening are great, but somehow they just don’t all mix together cohesively and most of this is due to the beating to death of a joke. Fear Town USA touched on a myriad of topics, skewered them and then moved on to the next target and that’s what kept it moving along at an even, comedic pace. It appears as though The Slashening may have had a bigger budget and this just adds to the feeling of disappointment, but perhaps I brought this disappointment on myself by having too high of expectations for it. It has to be said that despite my complaints, the group behind these films is wonderfully talented and I would still be just as excited to see another horror comedy from them.

Lisa Fremont

Twitter: @lcfremont

Images: facebook.com/theslashening & IMDb