By Rebecca Rinehart
Slaughterhouse Slumber Party
Directed by Dustin Mills
Starring Erin R. Ryan, Haley Madison, J. Ania Lupa, and Kayla Elizabeth
If you are in the mood for boobs, monsters, and juvenile comedy, Dustin Mills’ latest film delivers heftily in all three. Slaughterhouse Slumber Party centers around eight long-time friends who gather each year for a slumber party complete with drinking, nudity, pillow fights, and cheesy b-horror films. This year, the sweet Carol Ann (Elizabeth) decides to invite a new girl she recently met, Gretchen (Lupa). The gang is more than willing to welcome Gretchen with open arms even though she MAY be more than just a little weird.
Shot in reality TV style, footage of the party is punctuated with “interviews” of each woman telling her thoughts in real time. The first character to take the camera is Courtney (Madison) as she puts herself back together from heavy drinking before she joins in on the inevitable naked pillow fight. We are then taken back to the beginning of the night where the women catch up and try to size up their new slumber mate. Gretchen is less than a perfect party guest: she brings blood to drink out of a plastic bottle and smuggles bones into the house via her vagina. The women shrug this off until Gretchen dies during the pillow fight and they find out she was performing a satanic ritual in the attic to resurrect herself. Unhappy with the group, she comes back to kill each of them systematically with her various gnarly powers she has received from Satan himself.
Mills and FX guru Marcus Koch used a blend of CGI and practical effects to bring Gretchen’s rage to life. The film was shot on two smartphones so Mills creatively used colored lighting to add depth to the shots rather effectively. The cast is fantastic: most notably, the always-hilarious Madison as the slutty, drunk, IBS-suffering party girl and Lupa as the deadpan Gretchen.
The film debuted at the Nightmares Film Festival in Columbus in October to a thoroughly-amused audience. In addition to the slumber party story, we are treated to a fake trailer for the Rocket von Ribcage horror movie franchise. Lennon (Ryan) is a YouTube reviewer who loves these films and brings them to her reluctant friends to watch every year. When she realizes her friends humor her passion, she questions whether her love for these cheesy movies makes her a freak. Unsurprisingly, fans of this film will identify with Lennon in her self-doubt and also become hungry for an actual Rocket von Ribcage movie.
The film will be playing the festival circuit over the coming months with hopeful distribution. For more details about the film, watch my interview with Dustin at NFF 2019.
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Becca is a horror podcaster, YouTuber, interviewer and writer who has an extreme passion for all things macabre.
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