REVIEW: Slaugherhouse Rulez

It's a strange one, this. The first film to come from Stolen Picture, the new production company created by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, Slaughterhouse Rulez is very much channelling the spirit of the Cornetto Trilogy. Shaun of the Dead came out a whole fourteen years ago and the belated third movie The World's End was back in 2013, and so a relaunch of the skewed universe of Pegg and Frost is perhaps overdue.

Except this isn't quite the same thing as the Cornetto films. Edgar Wright is not involved; Slaughterhouse Rulez is directed by Crispian Mills, formerly of Kula Shaker, who also co-wrote the script with Henry Fitzherbert. There are multiple shots that seem to deliberately reference well-remembered moments from the trilogy, but while Mills is a skilled director, he hasn't the sketchy flair of Wright. Credited as executive producers, Pegg and Frost's fingerprints are all over the script, but this no two-man adventure for the best buds. In fact, they barely interact during the run of the film.

No, this film belongs to the youngsters (I won't say kids, since the cast are mostly in their twenties, as is traditional for films set in schools). Set in the fictional country school of Slaughterhouse, named for its legendary founding by the slaughterer of a monstrous beast, this is a merciless send-up of the nightmare world of the British public school system, where children are sent by parents who either desperately want to better their standing, or simply have more money than familial love. It's a time honoured institution, where children are separated from their families and bullied mercilessly by their elders, earning the right to eventually bully the newbies should they survive into the Upper Sixth. At least Slaughterhouse admits girls, which is better than Eton College (although fagging officially no longer exists in modern public schools, and Eton employs a lot of female staff – Slaughterhouse only manages to have two women on its staff, one of whom has already quit and the other, the terrifying matron played by Jane Stanness, barely seems to qualify as human).

Young Don Wallace, played with considerable charm by Peaky Blinders' Finn Cole, is the unfortunate kid who gets drafted into Slaughterhouse by his well meaning mum (Jo Hartley). On the plus side, he shares a room with a decent chap named Willoughby Blake, played by the excellent Asa Butterfield (Hugo, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas), and takes about ten minutes to fall madly in love with queen of the school Clemsie Lawrence (Hermione Corfield, terribly posh and all that). On the downside, he's sleeping in the bed of a boy who committed suicide, Willoughby insists on calling him Duckie, Clemsie is the definition of unattainable and the school corridors are stalked by the psychotic House God Clegg (Tim Rhys Harries – extremely posh, kind of sexy, utterly terrifying). Clegg wastes no time in making Don and Willoughby's lives a living hell. Don is the wrong sort of boy to be allowed into Slaughterhouse, while Willoughby dirties the school by being gay (public school life being at once intensely homoerotic and deeply homophobic, because only good straight boys can wank each other off).

Pegg plays Meredith Houseman, the terribly proper housemaster of Sparta, the specific prison of Don, Willoughby and Clegg, ageing cricketer and heart-broken ex-lover of former school nurse Audrey (appearing only on videophone and played by screen goddess Margot Robbie, a bit of a coup for Stolen Picture but chums with Pegg since Terminal). Martin Sheen is the school's headmaster, known by the boys as the Bat, for his florid swirling of his cape. Slaughterhouse Rulez could have been a perfectly good examination of the horrors of public school life, but is also a horror film and the most unsubtle environmentalist parable since Fern Gully. It's an outspoken anti-fracking script, which is absolutely correct of course, but god this is in your face. The Bat's connections and lust for extra cash and champagne lead him to inviting TerraFrack onto school grounds, led by an old Slaughterer played by Alex MacQueen (is it a coincidence that one of the actors to play the Master for Doctor Who is always accompanied by a theme involving four steady drumbeats?) A commune sets up camp in the woods in protest, led by Nick Frosts' ageing, drugged-up Slaughterhouse drop-out Woody, has little effect on operations, and before long, the lake is one fire and a gigantic sinkhole has opened up.
It's about halfway through the film that events lurch into horror mode, as demonic creatures living in caverns beneath the school escape to the overworld and begin noshing on students and teachers alike. The story becomes a race for survival, in which quite a lot of characters bite it, and while the focus is now on fear and desperation, these are actually the funniest scenes of the film. To be honest, the film as a whole isn't that strong as a comedy; there were no moments in the cinema when the audience broke out into a big laugh. It's more a film of little chuckles and sniggers than big belly laughs, but when hell breaks loose, the over-the-top massacre strikes a fine balance of horror and comedy. It's gory, but not too gory, so it stays on the right side of it. The monsters themselves are pretty well designed, although they'll never make it into the horror hall of fame: hairless hellhounds with huge, vicious teeth, sensibly kept mostly in the dark for maximum effect.
The romance between Don and Clemsy is nicely told, and once the horror begins, both their characters really come into their own: Don gets to be properly heroic, and Clemsy gets to be ballsy as hell. (It's always fun to hear a posh girl swearing, although Don can keep Clemsy; genius kickass chessmaster Kay (Isabella Laughland) is the girl for me.) It's Willoughby who's the heart of the story though, living with guilt and heartbreak and almost giving in.
Altogether, Slaughterhouse Rulez is a belting horror adventure, but a qualified success as a comedy. It might have benefited from being less obviously a descendant of the Cornetto films, but without the visibility of Pegg and Frost, would it have got the attention it deserves?

Shameless promotion!

This is just one of posts dedicated to marketing stuff my friends and I have produced. There's some good stuff here, so please do take a gander.

Firstly, Myth Makers' new volume, Golden Years, is finally now available for order. All eleven Doctors make an appearance, and there's a host of material by fine authors like Kelly Hale, Cody Quijano-Schell, Blair Bidmead and Stuart Douglas. Also, my own contribution, 'The Sleeping Ones,' which features the seventh Doctor and Ace. The full description is here and you can order it here!

Now, if you're a geek and you like cool things, you should check out Papyrusaurus, the amazing craft company run by my good friend, Chief Executive Dinosaur, Ashley Croyle-Mankoski. She produces fantastic artwork, most of it riffing on geeky stuff like Doctor Who, Firefly and Harry Potter
And if you're looking for Christmas decorations with a different flavour, you should take a look at her pine cones.If you're more into jewellery and suchlike, you should check out her other company Sticks and Tomes. She does incredible things with natural materials, turning them into incredible, wearable works of art. And while I say 'company,' both Papyrusaurus and Sticks and Tomes are just Ashley. She's awesome talented and wears big glasses, and you should buy her stuff.

On the more business-y side of things, if you're looking for professional graphic design, you should try Ryan O'Hara of Rhinobites. He offers design work for businesses of all sizes, and as a display of his skills, he has created this absolutely amazing poster for the Cornetto Trilogy.

Finally, and though I've pushed it before, I urge you all to buy and read The Terminal by the supremely talented Rachael Spellman. It's a mere £1.54 for Amazon Kindle. This girl is going places, you mark my words. We'll be seeing her name on the bestseller lists, I am sure. And read her blog, for more fiction, articles and thoughts. She's really quite astonishing.

Movie Review: The World's End

 Life's a long old game, and we all move on, to new places, new careers and new people. It's hard to believe that Shawn of the Dead was released almost a decade ago, and that its sitcom precursor Spaced began in 1999. With Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright moving on to bigger and better things, some of us wondered if the legendary 'Cornetto Trilogy' would ever be completed. Now, six years after Hot Fuzz, the trilogy is finally complete, and it's fitting that The World's End centres on a group of friends whose lives have drifted apart, returning to the site of their former glories.

Like the five former schoolboys who return to their hometown of Newton Haven, The World's End sees many familiar faces together again. Every actor who appeared in both Shawn of the Dead and Hot Fuzz appears here, either in a major role or a cameo, and there are more favourite actors besides. Even the opening montage, in which we meet our five heroes during their raucous school years, the film shows off its impressive cast, practically shouting "Look - we've got Pierce Brosnan!" Michael 'Tires' Smiley has a decent role at last, with Mark Heap and Julia Deakin showing up in due course. Only Katie Carmichael and Jessica Hines missing from the old Spaced line-up.

Simon Pegg, as expected, takes centre stage, but unusually in an anti-heroic role. While Shawn and Nicholas Angel were likeable, if flawed characters, sympathetic from the outset, Gary 'The King' King is an utter dickhead. A barely recovering alcoholic clinging to the glory days of his youth, Gary is the sort of kid everyone both loved and hated at school, the guy who always got away with whatever shit he played and pulled all the girls. Perhaps there's a little cheeky vengeance from our geeky creators here, as the popular pack-leader returns as a washed-up drunk. Pegg is, as usual, excellent, totally inhabiting his character and slowly gaining our fondness and sympathy.

The remaining four friends occupy different facets of the 'sensible one' character, but it takes four well-balanced men to keep Gary under even a semblance of control. Nick Frost is predictably brilliant as teetotal Andy, with Paddy Consadine, Martin Freeman and Eddie Marsan all creating likeable, if terribly sensible, characters. With his charm and inability to take no for an answer, Gary manages to persuade each of them to return to Newton Haven to recreate, and finally complete, the 'Golden Mile' - a mighty twelve-venue pub crawl, ending at the legendary inn, The World's End. As they return to their home town - filmed primarily in amusingly bland Welwyn Garden City - they find a town that has moved on only in its increased corporate conformity.

It's a joy watching these five men together - friends in real life as much as in the film - swapping stories and gradually growing back into their friendship, even if Gary is as much of a prick as he ever was. These are faces I grew up with, with Spaced in particular offering my fifteen-year-old self a taste of almost tangible young adulthood. The central tragedy of the film is that Hollywood superstardom is a distant fantasy for most of us. Simon Pegg may have gone on to become the king of the geeks and the toast of ComicCon, but the rest of us moved on to regular jobs and general disappointment. As Gary's unhappiness becomes clearer, we can probably feel for him more than Pegg can.

As the night roles on and the group become gradually drunker, the fantasy element finally makes itself apparent. In a scything satire on corporate buyouts and the 'Starbucksing' of our culture, the conformity of the pubs is revealed to extend beyond their identical menus and furnishings. Riffing on such classics as Quatermass II, The Midwich Cuckoos and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the town is revealed to be in the thrall of an alien intelligence, with anyone who refuses to conform being replaced by a blue-blooded 'blank.'

Edgar Wright stated at ComicCon that he considered The World's End to be a sort of drunken Doctor Who, and there's definitely an element of that. The mix of the extraterrestrial and the quintessentially British brings to mind Doctor Who's contemporary-set episodes (where's UNIT when you need them? They turned up in Shawn of the Dead). Gary King, with his poncy coat and swagger, certainly has an air of the cocky modern Doctors. You could imagine David Tennant rocking up hammered for a fight in a pub with a shout of "It's a fucking Auton!"

After taking on the zombie horror and buddy cop genres, Wright and Pegg simply had to end with an alien invasion. Once the truth is out, the tone shifts into one of stealthy intelligence gathering, interspersed with bouts of shocking violence (although the inky blue blood of the blanks softens the impact greatly). Wright's fight direction is better than ever, having had the involvement of Jackie Chan's fight coordinators, and the drunken brawling is a definite step-up from the Winchester pub battle of Shawn of the Dead. Throughout all this, however, the characters remain centre stage, with each of the five friends getting their moment to shine. Pegg and Wright excel in creating characters that we come to care about, and Gary, Andy, Peter, Steve and Oliver the O-Man are no different.

There are some missed opportunities. Rosamund Pike, as Oliver's sister Sam, does what she can with quite a shallow role, and her presence as a love interest seems unnecessary. She drops out of the plot when not needed, popping up again when required. The same can be said of David Bradley's UFO-nut character Basil (except the love interest part). The final act changes gear once again, upping the pace to a frenetic charge before settling back for the finale, at which the sci-fi trappings take over completely.

While possibly better than Shawn of the Dead, The World's End is a weaker film than Hot Fuzz, less focussed in its parodying of a genre. The humour is broader than in the previous two films, and there are fewer laugh-out-loud moments. The central cast holds it together though, creating five characters we care about throughout the film, and Gary and Andy's reconciliation over past mistakes provide a greater emotional payoff than in either Shawn or Fuzz. Whatever happens, Pegg and Frost's characters always end their films as best friends. Any other result would not sit right.

Through a medley of nineties hits on the jukebox, The World's End takes us on a crawl we'll never forget. That it doesn't quite measure up to Hot Fuzz is a minor criticism; this is still a contender for the finest film of the year. Sit back, grab a pint and unwrap a Cornetto for this trilogy's marvellous finale. Here's hoping that Pegg and Wright work together again in the future. Maybe they should be the ones to bring Doctor Who to the big screen...