Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Michael Sheen, Hermione Corfield, Simon Pegg, Asa Butterfield, Finn Cole, Nick Frost, Jo Hartley, Hanko Footman, Isabella Laughland, Jamie Blackley, Jassa Ahluwalia, Tom Rhys Harries, Kit Connor, Jane Staness, Sophie Rutter, Alex MacQueen, Margot Robbie.
We are playing dangerous games with the Devil, not the fabled creature who fell foul of a Celestial’s wrath, not the inhabitant of that Church and Bible inspired cess pit of flames and torture but instead our very own devil, our naked ambition, our rape of the land and the unquenchable thirst to dominate our will upon the throne of greed and violation. Our willingness to fracture the land in the pursuit of gas is one that will be an undoing, one in which will unleash a poison unless stopped, and one that audiences will find perfectly ripe for exploiting in a comedy-horror.
If killing is their business, then business is doing rather well for Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, and the writers of Slaughterhouse Rulez, Crispian Mills and Henry Fitzherbert, as they combine the supposed horrors of the English public-school system with the terror and dread of what fracking is doing to the world, the pursuit of an unnatural resource deep underground, the monsters that are awaiting to be unleashed.
Whilst many will view the film as being one in which the Simon Pegg/Nick Frost partnership is continued with reliably urgency and timing, it is to the younger actors, including the superb Asa Butterfield, Hermione Corfield, Finn Cole, Tom Rhys Harries, Kit Connor and Isabella Laughland, that the screen and the audience ultimately ends up embracing. A big screen offering in which the devilish excellence that Michael Sheen inhabits can play second fiddle to the likes of Asa Butterfield and Tom Rhys Harries for their intensity and timing, can only spell out how rich the future of British cinema really is.
The metaphor of the public-school system producing such creatures of the night is not lost on the audience, a deep symbol of engrained entitlement to many and the representation to others of just how divided the country is, it perhaps bares comparison to the protagonists and protagonists of the far-off future in the 1960s adaptation of The Time Machine, the Eloi and the Morlocks, one hardly knows which is the worse evil of humanity to come, those who live in unknowing, uncaring comfortable bliss, or those that roam under the soil, those who see the world as a source of food and only for their benefit.
A sublime and gruesomely cool first film for Simon Pegg and Nick Frost and their new production company, Slaughterhouse Rulez is the perfect addition to the British dark comedy horror genre.
Ian D. Hall