Main cast: Lisa Ambalavanar (Emily Young), Sydney Craven (Brianna Khinny), Olivia Rouyre (Madison Young), Bianca Beckles-Rose (Zenny), Andrew Horton (Tyler), Sutter Nolan (Sarah), Grace Patterson (Chloe), Milica Vrzic (Gabby), Annamaria Serda (Dakota), Rudi Rok (Alpha), Tiff Stevenson (Miss Mayflower), and Stefan Kapicic (Oliver)
Director: Matthew Goodhue
The sloth in Slotherhouse, which I believe is actually a puppet, is really cute. It’s also an adorable killing machine, as evidenced in the opening of this scene when it is attacked by a crocodile only to end up murdering the crap out of that thing. Well, it is tranquilized by hunters and is packed off to America to be sold.
Emily Young is a social-media clout-chaser wannabe that is jealous of Brianna, the popular if predictably mean president of the sorority house ∑λθ (sigma lambda theta, a way for the acronym SLTH to come into play) that has it made where being an influencer is concerned.
Because her mother was a former president of ∑λθ, she decides that she’d become one too. What better way to stand out from the crowd of wannabes and make herself an attractive candidate than to have a sloth pet? That will show everyone her commitment to SLTH!
Brianna won’t take Emily’s surge of popularity lying down; she has her simps get rid of Alpha. Unfortunately for everyone, Alpha doesn’t take too well to being treated this way, and now the claws are out… literally, in this case.
Oh boy, this movie is going to be dated really quickly because it tries so desperately to be hip. Chat windows pop up on the screen relentlessly because it wants so badly to remind me every few seconds that the vapid teens in this movie are permanently online, texting and liking and tagging and what not, that I can’t help feeling that it is just trying too hard.
I suppose it wants to appeal to kids that are permanently on TikTok, assuming that they can be pried long enough off their phones to sit down and watch a movie and assuming that they have an attention span long enough to sit through the whole movie, but I’m not sure if these kids want to watch yet another tired old accusatory rehash of how they are all dumb gits that can’t cut it in real life.
It’s probably a good thing like the sloth is adorable if tad unrealistically intelligent (it can plot and even speak English) because it has little else to recommend it.
The kills are bewilderingly boring. The most graphic it gets is showing me mildly bloodied corpses with claw gashes; most of the kills shy away from showing graphic violence.
Fine, maybe this film can bring on the comedy to make up for that, but one really has to like watching pretty ladies acting like braindead gorgons for long periods of time to find this thing hilarious.
Emily is a terrible lead character, as she has zero personality aside from her obnoxious narcissistic need to be the center of attention. In this movie, she finally gets to learn some hard lessons at the last minute—that she shouldn’t keep endangered animals as pets, especially since she just picks the sloth up like that in the first place, and she shouldn’t be such a desperate fame ho—but that’s after she spends so much of the movie being vapid, irritating, and unlikable.
The icing on the cake is that a sloth has to end up being killed just for this vapid spoiled egg tart of a wretch to learn that lesson.
At the end of the day, this bland and boring thing doesn’t have the comedy or horror to make it worthwhile. If anything, it succeeds too well in being as vapid as the target audience it wants to attract. So… congratulations, I guess?
