“This place looks like it was decorated by Charlie Manson.”

Drake’s rating: It takes more than just nightmares to make a Freddy

Drake’s review: So here’s a little secret that’s maybe not so secret, but if you weren’t there you might not know just how true it was. And that secret is that Freddy Krueger and the A Nightmare on Elm Street movies were huge in 1988. They were massively popular and had reach well beyond the horror community and into the general public. Everyone knew who Freddy was, even if they hadn’t even seen one of the films, and the character had far surpassed both Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees on his way to securing a hold in mainstream popularity.

With that in mind, it’s easy to see why you might want to mimic Freddy’s success with your own little horror flick by capitalizing on the notion of a killer manifesting through nightmares to wreak his own particular brand of evil. And that is 100% what the filmmakers did with Slaughterhouse Rock, which sees a young man named Alex tormented by horrific nightmares.

Alex soon realizes that the nightmares are taking place on Alcatraz Island, and one of his friends finds an old news article about a band that was killed there when they skipped the tour boat back to the mainland. The article suggests that the killings were part of a drug-fueled rampage, but as the nightmares get worse Alex knows there’s more going on and consults with a professor of his, Carolyn Harding (Donna Denton, Gor and because she didn’t get out while the gettin’ was good, Gor II). Harding is an occult researcher and it doesn’t take much prodding for her to jump into Alex’s problems with both feet, especially after physical manifestations of his nightmares start showing up.

So of course it’s off to Alcatraz for our erstwhile Scooby gang, where Alex’s brother Richard gets possessed by a demonic entity, almost everyone dies and then turn into snarky ghosts, and Toni Basil (Village of the Giants) shows up to help Alex by melding interpretive dance and movie flashbacks into a training sequence that allows the young man to learn how to project his consciousness into the astral plane.

And I know that sounds far-fetched, but it’s true. Richard does become a demon and spends most of the remainder of this flick chasing down the other Scoobies and dispatching them with as much gore as the FX budget would allow. I mean, you weren’t surprised by the Toni Basil dance routine, right? Because if Toni Basil is going to show up in your low-budget horror flick, let’s face it, she’s going to dance.

Slaughterhouse Rock isn’t a bad attempt to cash in on the Freddy craze of the late ‘80s, but it really could have done with some more work at the script level before the cameras started rolling. The characters are, unfortunately, fairly interchangeable, the plot is thin enough to see through, and the villain himself is so unremarkable that I’ve already forgotten his name. If they ever even named him. Eh, he’s the guy with the mustache.

And that’s the major problem with Slaughterhouse Rock. The villain, who should be this film’s answer to Freddy Krueger, is a veritable nonentity. There is absolutely nothing remarkable about the character, and certainly no visual flair like Freddy’s gloves to set him apart from any other stock horror monster. He’s just the ghost of an average-looking guy who used to be a cannibal, and even that sounds far more interesting than the movie makes it.

The actors do their best with what they have to work with, though. Andy Sidaris favorite Hope Marie Carlton is on hand to perk things up a bit, and Tom Reilly hams it up as both Richard and the demon. Everyone tries to do their best with what they’ve been given, but it isn’t enough to make Slaughterhouse Rock anything other than just another attempt to cash in on the popularity of Freddy Krueger.

In other words, don’t miss any sleep if you give this one a pass.

Intermission!

• Man, Alex & Co. are being stalked by a trio of Peyton Mannings. Absolutely nothing comes of this scene, by the way. I’m not sure if it was even scripted or just a bit of guerrilla filmmaking.
• Fringe jacket and matching suede boots. She obviously shopped at the same stores my wife did in the ‘80s.
• Oh man, that poor security guard got canned the hard way. Poor guy was probably only two days away from retirement.
• Getting sucked through a hole in the wall into the bright light beyond happened quite a bit in the ‘80s. I lost a roommate that way, but he left his TV behind, so it was all good.
• Richard turns into the demon just so the poster artist has something to work with.
• Toni Basil looks great as a ghost but her band turns up looking gory. Toni obviously had a better agent.
• The bitter ghosts are kind of a fun bit. The movie definitely recognizes that part of the Elm Street draw is the humor, but it has more trouble making the horror work.
• Getting rid of ghosts and demons with explosions. It’s definitely the ‘80s.