Directed by Matthew Goodhue

*SPOILERS FOR SLOTHERHOUSE*

I asked for a horror movie starring a sloth, and, for my sins, I got one. Many years ago, in a review of Cannibal Holocaust, I remarked how the sloth seen in that movie may have been the only sloth to appear in a horror movie. Here we are, years later, and I finally have a slasher movie starring a sloth, one that I was so pumped to see that it made me legitimately sad when I couldn’t attend the one-night theater release in person. After all that Slotherhouse finally came to Hulu and after having seen it I can say with no hesitation or remorse that it is not good. At all. It hurt me more than any movie I’ve seen in a long – long – time. So let’s dissect this thing and find out what went wrong.

Deep in the rainforests of somewhere, a sloth resting on a tree is attacked by a giant crocodile but somehow escapes before being shot with a tranquilizer dart by a poacher and sloth knapped. As the poacher walks away with his haul, we see the crocodile float to the surface of the water, three slash marks facing the sky. It’s a strong start and I was still hopeful at this point. Then we meet our protagonist, a sorority sister who “adopts” the sloth in question and uses it to gain popularity, in the form of ‘Follower’ counts that appear over every character’s head when they’re introduced. While she’s using this sloth to gain popularity, the sloth begins killing. Why? Who knows. Probably so a movie could happen.

There’s some shaky stuff early on, particularly the look of the Sloth, which, at best, looks like a muppet who spent a decade at a crackhouse, but the moment that soured me on Slotherhouse was when we learned what the sorority’s name is. It is Sigma Lambda Tau. Her sorority. Is SLT. That’s the style of humor Slotherhouse has, and I don’t know if this is supposed to be some kind of wink and nod at the less politically correct days of slashers of yore, or if the director just thinks calling women sluts is funny. That little gem certainly isn’t helped by the extremely timely and not-at-all dated and homophobic trope of the predatory lesbian sorority sister who is there to creep on the pledges.

God it’s like I’m seeing double…

Maybe none of that bothers you. Maybe I’m just a big stick in the mud who can’t appreciate good clean fun. After all, the main draw of this movie is the sloth killing people, so I’ll judge the film on the killer sloth, rather than the homophobia. The killer sloth has two problems, number 1, it doesn’t look like a sloth, and number 2 it doesn’t act like a sloth. What I mean by that is, the first time we see the sloth it claws a croc to death. Fine, that’s a perfectly reasonable way for a vicious sloth to kill someone. The next attack comes when the sloth grabs someone’s phone and throws it in the street so that the person runs into the street and gets hit by a car. Then the sloth drives a car to the hospital to finish the job and kill this girl.

This is completely absurd, but that isn’t really the problem. Absurd stuff happens all the time in good comedies and can be hysterical given the right context, and the right setup for the joke. If there was ever any setup for the sloth being hyperintelligent, or a murderous human trapped in a sloth body, or even if we saw the sloth reading a driving manual, that could maybe work as a joke or at least an explanation. Alternatively, sloths are funny because they have such expressive faces, so seeing this doll sitting in a driver’s seat doesn’t connect with me as a joke because it doesn’t look like a sloth making her way downtown, it looks like someone threw a stuffed animal in a car.

And that is the exact same problem with the sloth kills. The creators of the movie were so in love with the idea of a sloth killing people, they never stopped to figure out how to make the killer sloth killing people funny OR scary. Most of the kills are, ‘the sloth appears next to someone, then the camera cuts and we hear a scream’. Riveting. A concept isn’t enough to carry a movie, especially when the concept is, ‘What if we made a bad slasher movie but instead of a regular slasher villain we replaced them with a sloth and only changed one page of the script?’. Later on, the sloth is getting shot, stabbed, thrown through windows, and never seems to get injured, with no explanation. Those are the kind of things that happen in other slasher movies so they have to happen here, I suppose. That’s not scary or funny, it’s just confusing.

I’m a lot angrier than I have been, and probably a lot harsher than I’ve been on recent movies, even recent movies that I’ve disliked, but that’s because I was excited about this movie. I didn’t think I was going to love Saw X, so any enjoyment I got out of it was a plus, but I thought I’d love Slotherhouse. It’s a slasher movie, one of my favorite subgenres, about a sloth, my favorite animal, and then does nothing with any of that. I sit here a broken man, wondering what other dreams that I have are actually nightmares waiting for me to discover. Thanks, Slotherhouse.