Slaughter Night

Quick! Name your top five all time favorite horror films from the Netherlands.

OK. How about just a top three? Top two? Any? Even I have to admit that when it comes to slasher flicks, the Netherlands sits on equal par with India and Madagascar as countries that I don't traditionally think of as great horror genre producing empires.

But then I got a surprise in the mail with the 2006 Netherlands slash and gash film Slaughter Night (Sl8n8). The films packaging caught my eye immediately with a young blonde in a red hoody sitting in a pool of water with a shotgun tucked behind her knees. Call me old fashioned, but this is the kind of box art that gets me to stop in my tracks when I'm scouring the video store shelves for a DVD to watch with the girlfriend late on a Saturday night.

But as we all know, box art does not necessary dictate good film so it was up to the first chapter of the flick to catch my attention.

Slaughter Night did not disappoint. It all begins in 1857 where a child murder has two girls bound in his wooden shack of an abode where heads of other unfortunate younglings lie perched atop spokes. It was as if Jason Voorhees' basement got pimped out by TLC's While You Were Out designers. The psycho is identified as one Andries Martiens and we later learn that before the death penalty was abolished in 1860, men accused of crimes were forced to go down into the mines and set off gas leaks that was 100% effective in dealing with their sentence.

All the movie has to do now is connect the 1857 death of Andries Martiens in the mine to a group of hot looking, expendable young things and you have a horror film that is the perfect compliment to the Pretty in Pink you had to sit through to get to your half of the double feature.

It all starts with the obligatory introductions that are quickly forgotten when an expected car accident leaves one of the starlings of the film (Victoria Koblenko) without a father figure. The accident is alarming and comes just one week after a similar shocking moment occurred in the opening set-up of Disturbia.

So, what better way to escape the memories of the horrific incident than to gather a group of friends and travel to a mine where her father was working on a book about the infamous Andries Martiens. Sounds good to me, and luckier still – that is exactly what happens. Cause let's face it, what's scarier than the ever running tunnels of a mine shaft. You don't have to look further than the overlooked 1981 film My Bloody Valentine to get the claustrophobic feel of being in a cold, dark and damp place where daylight is about as far away as me getting some action at the conclusion of this gore fest to understand how a mine shaft could be the perfect breeding ground for carnage.

Helping matters along is the Ouija Board that one of the expected victims brings along in an attempt to communicate with her father which coupled with their presence leads to a night that has moments that harkened me back to the glory days of Evil Dead where demonic possession of your best friends leads to some awkward moments of 'geez, I really liked you, but I am going to take you head off with a shovel'.

I must admit to sitting with a grin on my face for most of Slaughter Night and really, I have to definitive reason why. It's all been done before and without subtitles to boot. But this movie just got to me. The production values were good and the story was fun enough to sit back and enjoy while the body count added up like a tilted abacus. With enough decapitations to do five or six films, Slaughter Night delivers the goods and let's face facts…. how many times can you say that about a horror film you have never heard of? So for all you horror fans out there that rent and buy crap DVD after crap DVD based on cover art and quotes thrown on movie posters from reviewers that might not even exist, Slaughter Night is the perfect addition to any horror collection. It's gory. It's violent. And it's foreign, so at least you can tell your friends that you are broadening your intellectual scope.

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In 1857, child murderer Andries Martiens, is sent into a mine as a punishment for his crimes. His punishment? He must detect dangerous methane leaks by setting them off...personally.

On a ride home from a club, Kristel Lodema confronts tragedy with the sudden death of her father in a freak car accident. In a attempt to learn more about her recently deceased father she travels to Belgium with a group of friends, to pick up her father's last manuscript. Coincidentally, her father used to work in the same mine that Andries Martiens was executed in.

The new tour guide convinces Kristel and her friends to go into the mine for a guided tour. A tour which unleashes a great evil and ends with many, many, grisly murders....including plenty decapitations! Slaughter Night is (as the name suggests) a slasher flick. In all honesty, the film is kinda like a combination of The Descent, and the original Evil Dead....although Slaughter Night isn't as good a film as either of those Horror classics. This is not to say the film is bad, but it's just not anything all that special.

The performances themselves aren't bad, the direction is good. The editing needs some work as many scenes set up without proper introduction, and the killer seems to pop out in too many different areas, far too quickly than is humanly possible. If you can set your brain on vacation, you might come out liking this film.

That being said, let's make this really simple.

If your a fan of trashy horror films, and love watching stupid teens get sliced and diced. You'll love this movie. SL8N8 features some of the most gruesome deaths i've seen on film in recent memory. Boat loads of gore, with little or no hard substance. And if that's your stuff, then don't hesitate and pick this film up! If your looking for a good, solid horror film with character development and a strong plot with strong performances, go watch The Descent or something comparable. Because SL8N8 is NOT a Horror masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination. It's just a fun Slasher Flick with more than it's share of brutal violence.

**I do wish to caution those who might be upset by violence involving young children, because Slaughter Night features a few scenes of grisly violence involving children.** But if you can get past that, check this movie out. it's just a really fun, gory horror film from the Netherlands.

Sl8 N8 is the Dutch answer to My Bloody Valentine... and done much, much better. Obviously the budget wasn't the largest here, but the director and crew seemed to make the most of what they had. Effects were clearly limited and relied on camera shakes and piercing noises on moments with high tension. While this effect can easily be overdone, it isn't here. Instead of going overboard and having these effects become distracting like other low budget horror films that try the same, here it is practiced with careful restraint and just the right touch.

Sl8 N8 also gives us a killer with a purpose. Our supernatural slasher isn't killing at random or just for fun, oh no... He is trying to escape from hell or limbo through a satanic ritual that requires the heads of 8 victims. And just where would our story be without a cliché connection that links our main character and her dead father to our setting. There are other cliché's, but none that really take away from the film, after all they are clichés so they do fall into what you've come to expect category. Hey, I never said that it wasn't simple...

The gore factor slowly increases steadily throughout the film at just the right spots and should satisfy a good percentage of gore hounds by the end of the film... Giving us everything from brains to blood to fire to almost cannabilism - OK, let's call it really graphic flesh tearing via mouths.

All in all, Sl8 N8 is a nice Dutch edition to the horror genre, again it's nothing new, but it's effective and definitely worth a watch on a rainy day.

6.5/10

Well, Sl8n8 isn't exactly original horror; but it does a good job of taking the common slasher clichés and moulding a fun and gory little horror film out of them. The film reminded me a lot of the direct to video crap-fest "Curse of the Forty-Niner" as it features supernatural themes, a mine and some dumb teenagers, but luckily the similarities end there. The slasher film is more associated with the US than the Netherlands (which I generally don't associate with films in general), but it would seem that the writers of "Sl8n8" have watched enough American films to see how the slasher works. The plot is frankly ridiculous, and starts with a car crash in which a girl's father is killed. She then goes on a road trip with her friends, and stops at his office to recover some stuff. They end up getting roped into having a tour of an old mine where a murderer who the girl's father was researching met his end. Naturally, things soon go wrong and the kids decide that it's time to experiment with a Ouija board, which turns out to be a big mistake as now the murderous spirit is on the rampage...

The good thing about this film is definitely the fact that it's gory. Writer-directors Frank van Geloven and Edwin Visser obviously realise that the lack of brains can easily be masked with a lot of nasty gore scenes, and it has to be said that this works well as the death scenes definitely do make the film a lot of fun to watch. The film does take a short while to get going, and not much happens in the first half; but once it shifts up the gears, Sl8n8 becomes a relentless and engaging little flick, but I don't suppose I'm going to remember much of it in a few weeks time. The main thing that annoyed me about the film, however, was the flashy cinematography; which sometimes made it near on impossible to tell what is going on. Other criticisms include the title - I'm not a fan of the whole substituting numbers for letters thing (cough Se7en cough), and "Sl8n8" really is a poor title. I suspect it will be changed when/if this film gets a US release as in English that title comes out as 'Sleight Neight'! Overall, this film is fun enough and I'd certainly recommend it for an hour and a half's entertainment.

The feeling I got after this movie was (surprisingly): hey, this is not bad! Not bad at all - for Dutch horror. I must admit that I've never seen any other Dutch horror-movie to compare it to ('De Vierde Man' comes to mind, but that's a movie from the mid-'80s and i'd rather call it 'mystic' than 'horror') - but that doesn't matter much. What dóes matter is that this movie isn't bad at all.

All and all, the story-line is nothing spectacular. In fact, it's all been done só many times that if somebody'd quickly sum up the events of this movie, you'd expect it to be extremely boring. However, it's a fact that most of the time, in horror, clichés work great. And because the horror-genre isn't so terrible overdone here in the Netherlands, the people that made this movie have a fresh(ish) approach to all those clichés, and turn it into something that's quite enjoyable to watch.

So, strangely enough, here we have a film that's stuffed to the brim with cliché (even the most corny horror-line ever ('we're gonna have to split up') is used) but that's still enjoyable to watch on an otherwise lost Saturday-evening. And not ónly because it happens to be Dutch.