(Photo courtesy of: IGN) “‘Slotherhouse’ follows a murderous sloth.”
Riley Fontana
Connector Editor
“Slotherhouse” is a PG-13 2023 horror film starring a murderous sloth. This independent film is currently streaming on Hulu. It’s a complete campy mess, making it the perfect Halloween watch. This movie is a perfect background film for parties or really any time people need a good laugh.
The film follows Lisa Ambalavanar as Emily and a sloth she adopts named Alpha. Emily is trying to become the president of her sorority and Alpha is her ticket to the top. She quickly gains popularity within her sorority, while Alpha is slowly taking out girls against her. The movie builds up to one big slasher fest, with most of the blood and gore shown off-screen.
The sloth puppet is really ugly and almost none of the characters have personality, which makes this movie so much better. This movie feels like a shell of a script that got turned into a movie and it is amazing, almost no attention needs to be given to fully understand what is happening. Every character is a husk of a developed character and it works perfectly for what the film was going for.
This movie is the perfect balance of horror comedy, leaning into absurd humor more than anything else. The main kicker of the movie is that no one can outrun or fight back against a sloth on anxiety medication. “Slotherhouse” also perfectly uses limited blood to make this a really good starter horror for older kids, but also to anyone who does not like blood.. This is an incredible take on modern campy films, it set out to be bad and was enjoyably so. Much of the campy horror genre relies on the movies aging to become campy and the enjoyable type of bad.
For a movie about a killer sloth, there are shockingly meaningful messages and lessons within the film. The main one is obviously that poaching and adopting exotic animals is bad, but there are also lessons on saving friends and the sisterhood sororities can bring. It also raises questions and pokes fun at sorority life and culture. There are many scenes where the sisters are partaking in weird and dangerous rituals, and ultimately the sloth steps in to cut the festivities short. It also showcases how sorority life can quickly become a dangerous popularity game, with the main conflict building because Emily wants to become more popular than the current house president.
“Slotherhouse” is far from a modern horror masterpiece but it is a good time. It has so much force behind it as a perfectly weird and funny horror film. The cast clearly knows how absurd what they are doing is and it perfectly creates the film. This is not a movie for the history books, but just an amazing watch to kill an hour and a half. It has a perfect amount of horror, comedy and campiness it never took itself too seriously. This weird and one-of-a-kind movie released just in time for Halloween.
Overall Grade: A
