Slaughterhouse (1987)

When a few friends out shooting an amateur horror movie split up for the night, two of them run through the woods, playfully chasing each other and winding up outside of the local run-down slaughterhouse. Before they can get their bearings, they are found by Buddy, a huge, filthy hillbilly with a giant long-handled meat-clever. He gleefully hacks them up with his clever, squealing and grunting like a pig the whole time.

We are then treated to a title sequence with goofy music played over stock footage of an actual slaughterhouse in action. Yuck.

Harold Murdock, owner and manager of the new, modern-style slaughterhouse has one thing standing in the way of success: Bacon and Son's Hog Slaughtering. The business is on the verge of bankruptcy and the county is going to take the property, but Lester Bacon still won't sell out to Harold's company.

Lester appreciates the good old days of craftsmanship in the meat business, and can't abide the impersonal, mechanized, modern version of the trade. Buddy, his son, appreciates a good waller in the pig pen, and is happy to kill anybody who messes with his hogs. And that means Murdock, the Sheriff, and everybody else involved in taking the Bacon's property. It also means the teenagers who came to the old slaughterhouse to shoot their video.

Slaughterhouse (a.k.a. Bacon Bits. Awesome.) is one that caught my eye a million times on VHS. That image of the hillbilly and his giant clever standing in a smoky doorway was nice and evocative, as was the wonderful tagline: "Buddy has an axe to grind. A BIG axe." And yet I never got around to renting it. Years later, I was thrilled to see it come to dvd (now out-of-print) and happily snatched up a copy. The movie lived up to my expectations as a slasher flick with a sense of humor.

Lester makes a delightfully exasperated but loving father for the deranged Buddy. It's kind of like the relationship between Jed Clampett and Jethro. He's patient and understanding, and always willing to make the best out of Buddy's mistakes. To make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, you might say.

Buddy is kind of hilarious for an axe murderer. He carries a hog around as a pet, he eats dog food from a can, he squeezes into the dead deputy's shirt (fat guy in a little coat!) and joyrides in the police car to a shit-kicking country song, and he snorts and grunt and squeals everywhere he goes. To quote his daddy, Lester, "Buddy is a good boy, but he has what you might call a basic hygiene problem." Ha.

Animal lovers and vegetarians may find this movie unpleasant, revolving around the hog slaughtering business and all. But if that doesn't bother you too much, Slaughterhouse is a fun flick. It clearly doesn't take itself seriously, with all its puns and wacky characters, and yet it is at least as good a slasher movie as most that were churned out in the 80s. If you can track down a copy, it's well worth a watch. It would make a good double-feature with Motel Hell, too.