Horror and comedy have often joined to create enduring, terrifying and hysterical works. The Evil Dead series, the early films of Peter Jackson, as well as movies like Scream are some examples. Still, horror comedies tend to play themselves relatively straight.
It’s harder to pull off broader spoofs of the genre. Take Scary Movie, for example. The first flick was a funny send-up of horror tropes, but while the series suffered from diminishing returns over four subsequent entries, it never really delivered scares along with the laughs.
That’s also the case with Slashening: The Final Beginning, a slasher parody that undercuts its shocks every chance it gets, but doesn’t always get laughs.
Taking place five years after the original Slashening, the movie focuses on 22-year-old Madison (Addie Weyrich), who experienced a family trauma spinning out of the original Long Island Slashening.
Madison joins a counseling group led by Pat (Patrick Foy), who survived the first movie, albeit without an eye…and his penis. But one by one, the group starts to disappear, thanks to a burlap-masked stranger with a thing for creative homicides.
If you haven’t seen the first movie (like me), then a quick prologue tells you everything you need to know, as a group of people in the original Slashening house are brutally dispatched after recapping the first movie. It also establishes the tone moving forward: a jokey, gory takedown of 21st century 20-somethings, rather than just making fun of slasher tropes.
That’s an interesting direction, and there are a few truly inspired scenes (such as a long take involving a stripper in an art gallery that gets more absurd as it continues). But the movie feels like a collection of sketches more than it does a horror feature, sketches that go on a little too long and cause the movie to feel a bit draggy in spots, even at a brief 80-minute runtime.
Part of that sketch comedy feel comes from the cast, all talented, trained improvisers who feel like they’re mostly doing their own schtick. That’s less on them than it is on writer-director Brandon Bassham, who packs the movie with jokes about consent, male “feminists,” and gentrification. Slashening: The Final Beginning is a mixed bag of jabs at Williamsburg millennials, but never really a scary movie in itself.
The last 20-30 minutes really play up the Troma pedigree, with some unflinching gross-out humor and a lot more gore, leading to a wonderfully conceived chase, a nihilistic twist and a gut-punch of a last line. But the road there is pretty uneven. Slashening: The Final Beginning has a few good laughs and some giggles, but horror fans might want something a little more spine-tingling.
* * * * *
Produced by Brandon Bassham, Khaled Sayed,
Brittany Tomkin, Merritt Evelyn Christensen, Al Holm
Written and Directed by Brandon Bassham
Starring Addie Weyrich, Jean Louise O’Sullivan, Lloyd Kaufman,
Patrick Foy, McManus Woodend, Marcus Bishop-Wright,
Jack Frederick, Colin O’Brien, Jamie Lutz, Madonna Refugia
Slashening: The Final Beginning premieres
tonight April 30th via Laemmle Virtual Cinema
Tickets are on sale exclusively HERE
