The Slaughter Rule

The Slaughter Rule is one of the few unique films that captivates the viewer straight from the opening sequence. The film opens with a haunting shot, as twin brothers Alex and Andrew Smith take there camera through a barb-wire fence to reveal a helpless dying deer, literally struggling for its every last breath of life. Enter Roy Chutney, a high school student who is cut from the varsity football team just three days prior to losing his estranged father. Much like the deer, Roy never gives up in his struggle to live his life in wake of tragedy, even after losing just about everything that held meaning in his young adulthood. Roy is eventually approached by the local paper distributor Gideon (played with remarkable passion and sustain by the brilliant David Morse). Gideon asks Roy to join his roughneck 6-man football team. Upon joining, Roy is taken under Gideon's wing and must eventually confront the small-town rumors that linger regarding Gideons sexuality, and turbulent past. The Slaughter Rule is unlike any high school football movie ever made. First of all, the film omits any of the standard hallway and classroom scenes that frequent every other film of the genre, It also discards the glorified high school football stadiums that almost give the impression they could be home to the next super bowl. Instead the scenes in this film are mainly set in country bars, private bedrooms, and cold icy fields, where the viewer can almost feel themselves being slammed into the frozen tundra alongside the players themselves. Where most football movies feature strong, good-looking, "prom king" type players, The Slaughter Rule uses gritty, "normal-looking" kids, that could easily be seen tossing the pigskin around in any small middle American town. Eric Edwards stunning cinematography, and alt/country musician Jay Farrar's folk influenced score, help make The Slaughter Rule one of the most promising directorial debuts in recent years, and was by far the best film I saw at the 2002 Lake Placid Film Festival. I strongly urge anyone who has ever experienced loss from death or rejection, to watch this film. For those of you who have not, pull that letterman jacket out of the closet and rent Varsity Blues.

Jesse Haven is a 19 year old film student from Burlington, Vermont Questions or comments?? Email me

Needs to be subtitled sometimes, t'was either the accent or the poor sound system. Unfortunately I'm not into any kind of sport so that does not help but now know a little bit more about American football. A good first time effort.

Having this movie shot in my hometown (Great Falls, Montana), I answered a local casting call for extras. Blink and you'll miss me in the bonfire/party scene. My high school (Great Falls High) was the school used in the beginning of the film, and the locker room the team is in happens to be the girl's locker room. David Morse's character lives above a vacuum place downtown. The hospital in the movie used to actually be the old Colombus hospital, but is now a office building.

The twins in the movie (Matt and Paul Pippinich), I went to school with for 7 years, and that old orange truck is theirs. Matt played clarinet in a dixieland jazz band.

When I saw this movie at the Wilma theater in Missoula, MT, one of the directors was there to answer questions. He said that they chose Great Falls (pop. approx. 60,000) for shooting "because it was sort of the town that time forgot." In some ways, this is true, but the city is not as run down and rural as it appears in the movie.

Overall, I found myself enjoying this movie more for the "hey, I know him!" or "I lived 2 miles from there" situations. While this wasn't a movie that I would want to watch repeatedly, I still highly suggest it for rental. It's more than just a "sports" movie.

Also, a stellar soundtrack that makes the movie that much better.

I don't usually find movies first by their soundtrack, but I first heard of "The Slaughter Rule" because Jay Farrar, of the late Uncle Tupelo, did the score and song selections, including by Vic Chestnutt, the Flatlanders, and the Pernice Brothers. So I was intrigued when I saw it was on Sundance Channel as it hadn't appeared on screens in New York.

The debut jointly written/directed feature of twin brothers Andrew and Alex Smith, the film has a lot of similarity to Tom Cruise's early "All the Right Moves," even down to charismatic young star Ryan Gosling clearly being a movie star hunk of the future.

Set in the brothers' home area of rugged (and very desolate) Montana in the fall, this film takes its working class football frame of athlete seeking father figure and coach conflict much further in examining maleness and the implications of the homo-eroticism of such sports much further.

It bravely (particularly by David Morse in a touchingly agonized performance) goes into the breach of what much discussion of current scandals has avoided, at the confused nexus of pedophilia and sexual identity, particularly for teen-age boys.

There's also a dollop of racial issues via the very realistically portrayed poverty of the Native Americans.

The women are mostly helpless within this overwhelmingly male environment, and their best choice for survival is just to leave, as unromantically satisfying as that is.

This ranks in the gritty tradition of sports movies as a setting to demonstrate social tensions like "Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" than more popular fare.

This is a prime example of a flick that breaks all the rules and is still damn good. You always hear filmmakers blather on about how they work their own way, and then you see their junk and think that maybe they should have read a book. This is not one of those times. it's an intense look into sports and rural life and how they interplay with one another in the Midwest.

I was drawn to it by the title, and although it is about football, i could totally relate because when i played Youth baseball, I was on a team so bad one year that literally half of our games were called off early.

Not that this has to do totally with sports, it is more about male relationships, as Roy, the lead character deals with the death of his father through his participation in six-man football. As the story unfolds, he is cut from his own team and hooks up with a new team coached by a strange outsider played by David Morse. he starts off just being intense, but then becomes creepy (there is a homoerotic undertone between coach and player). Ryan Gosling, who plays Roy is solid and Morse is terrific. This ain't "Remember The Titans" but still very much worth checking out. It got good press at this past year's Sundance Film Festival.