Wednesday, April 29, 2020

Film Appreciation - Bring Home the Bacon, Butcher Boy


Cody Hamman carves out some Film Appreciation for the 1987 slasher Slaughterhouse.


Writer/director Rick Roessler's slasher movie Slaughterhouse begins in the same way many slashers do: a couple of teens who out having fun stick their noses where they don't belong and end up becoming the first characters to get murdered. In this case, the teens are Kevin (Joel Hoffman of Slumber Party Massacre 2) and his girlfriend Michele (Courtney Lercara), and they're messing around near an old slaughterhouse when Kevin makes the mistake of picking up a shovel and using it to disturb a bunch of fenced-in pigs. Within seconds of Kevin messing with those pigs, someone comes along with a huge "bone cruncher" cleaver and kills both Kevin and his girlfriend.


The slaughterhouse is called Bacon & Sons, and it has been run by Lester Bacon (Don Barrett) for the last thirty years. Unfortunately, Lester has run into some financial problems and his property is now on the verge of foreclosure. Tom Sanford (Bill Brinsfield), a former employee of Lester's who now runs his own meat company, shows up at Bacon & Sons one day accompanied by Sheriff Borden (William Houck) and lawyer Harold Murdock (Lee Robinson) to make an offer: Lester can avoid the trouble of foreclosure and his property being sold in a public auction if he just sells the place to Sanford. Sanford will give him $55,000 for the property, allow him to remain in his house, which is right beside the slaughterhouse, and hire him as a consultant. The slaughterhouse itself will be demolished and replaced by a modern plant. Lester is insulted by the deal and turns it down. So Borden makes it official that the property has gone into foreclosure. Lester has thirty days to vacate the premises.


Minutes after Sanford, Borden, and Murdock have left, Lester is horrified to discover that his adult son Buddy (Joe Barton) killed those two teens from the opening sequence and has hung their bodies up in the slaughterhouse. Lester doesn't condone killing random youths for messing with the hogs, but now that Buddy has crossed that line it causes Lester to formulate a deadly plan of revenge: he'll get Sanford, Borden, and Murdock to come back to the slaughterhouse one-by-one and he'll have Buddy kill them.


Buddy Bacon is presented as if he's a hulking beast of a man, even though Barton was shorter than some of the other cast members at a height in the range of 5'7" to 5'9". As the movie he's in was obviously inspired to some degree by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Buddy himself is reminiscent of Leatherface; he's a simple-minded fellow who loves the pigs that are on his property and is something of a pig himself, as he only communicates through pig-like oinks and snorts, much like Leatherface spoke in squeals and gibberish in the original Chainsaw. Still, Buddy stands apart as his own character, and Barton did a great job of bringing him to life, whether moments required him to be disgusting and homicidal or child-like and silly.


Of course, this wouldn't be much of a slasher if we were just watching Lester and Buddy knock off three middle-aged men. Plenty of other characters get involved in the mayhem, including family man / inept police officer Deputy Dave (Jeff Wright); Dave's mistress Sally Jean (Donna Stevens); Borden's daughter Liz (Sherry Bendorf), who turns out to be the heroine - yes, the "final girl" was randomly named in reference to Lizzie Borden; and the group of friends Liz is shooting a wacky "horror video" with. It's never explained why Liz is making a horror video or what she intends to do with it once it's complete, but it gives her companions Skip (Erich Schwarz), Buzz (Jeff Grossi), and Annie (Jane Higginson) an excuse to run around in the slaughterhouse while Liz shoots their shenanigans with a VHS camera.

And the teens messing around in the slaughterhouse gives Buddy an excuse to kill them. He kills anyone who crosses his path because, as his father says, he has gone "hog wild".


Slaughterhouse is a later and more obscure entry in the 1980s slasher boom, but it has also been one of my favorite slashers ever since I rented it on VHS in the late '80s. I was a young kid at that time, building up my genre fandom by renting every horror movie that caught my attention at the local video stores (and there were several rental places to choose from in my small hometown back then). This movie made the same impact on me that some of the more famous horror classics made, and I still have some vague memories of watching Slaughterhouse for the first time more than thirty years ago, the way it felt to be introduced to the characters of Lester and Buddy Bacon, the way I was drawn into their story. One viewing and I became a fan for life.

This still holds up as a fun and odd indie slasher with some unexpected flourishes - the ride Buddy takes in a police cruiser; the town dance party that is built up for most of the movie and then comes to a quick end, only getting enough screen time to raise the film's production value; the horror video aspect; how amusing Lester and Buddy can be one minute, and how gross they can be the next. In a bit of "turnabout is fair play", it also felt like parts of Slaughterhouse inspired certain elements of Texas Chainsaw 3D years later.


The only thing I would change about Slaughterhouse is the title sequence, which plays out over images of pigs being processed through a real slaughterhouse. I skip over that sequence every time I watch the movie.

Other than that, Slaughterhouse is great. I really wish Buddy Bacon had returned in a sequel at some point, as the door was left wide open for one. Sadly, Roessler not only never got the chance to make a Slaughterhouse 2, he never got the chance to make another movie, period. He had kids to raise (his son and daughter both make quick appearances at the "Pig Out" dance) and couldn't abandon a steady job to focus on low-paying filmmaking ventures. Even after he said he was ready to make another movie in a featurette about the making of Slaughterhouse that was put together in 1999, a second Rick Roessler movie just never happened. That's a shame, but I'm thankful he took a chance on filmmaking to give us Slaughterhouse.

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