Slaughtered opens with a topless model being killed and photographed and moves from there. Circularly.

Here is the first movie without plot, characters, or, for the most part, anything of any real interest happening. This film doesn’t progress; it cycles, endlessly repeating events that have come before and will come after. To view it is to be stultified.

I was going along fine for the first murder, where the topless model is beaten over the head with a baseball bat and then photographed. I was even going along fine for the second murder, where the photographer spies on a model as she changes into fetish gear, photographs her, slits her throat, and photographs her some more. But by the time the third one came along, changed, got tied up, took off her top, got photographed, put the nipple clamps on, got electrocuted, and got photographed some more, I gave up and went and made myself a sandwich.

Things proceed accordingly from there. (I grow weary of fast-forwarding on this chapter-less screener, so screenshots end here.) A hooker gets held up at knifepoint and is forced to strip, be photographed, be stabbed, and then be photographed again. Ironically, this occurs after the photographer has just disposed of the body of his last victim. This one, though, he just leaves lying where she falls, which I guess kind of negates the purpose of disposing of any of them, but oh well.

A girl whose sister was murdered then comes by to get her revenge on the photographer, but she gets captured, tied up, photographed, killed, and photographed. Then another model comes over...

Occasionally, it must have struck those responsible for this that doing the same thing over and over wasn’t very interesting; so, to “spice things up,” there are intermittent episodes in which we get one camera angle on one woman sitting in the corner of a room (standing for an office) who plays a detective. She gets a call from one of the missing girls’ mothers and then slowly, slooooooowly begins to figure out that perhaps the fact that all these girls went missing after working for the same death-fetish website might have something to do with their disappearances. The fact that her investigation moves at a pace so agonizing it makes Olga Karlatos’ eye-gouging in Zombie look like hyperbolic action footage from a Michael Bay production definitely doesn’t help make these scenes more interesting, either.

In addition, the fact that the film’s pacing is about as agonizingly laborious as the detective’s also doesn’t improve matters. Slaughtered eases into all of its investigation scenes like an old man into a hot bath. A “detective sequence” will generally begin with the woman talking on the phone for a while or yelling at her computer for its malfunctioning ways before she finally gets down to business; then it will ease out again just as gently, generally letting the woman make a few more phone calls or talk to her computer some more (whichever of these she wasn’t engaged in at the beginning of said scene) before finally, slowly, so very slowly, fading out...

(I’ll issue a spoiler warning for the following paragraph, despite the fact that I find it rather unnecessary. Since the ending is basically just when the movie stops happening, I don’t really feel there’s anything to spoil; but for any maniac who wants to watch this and not know what happens in the end, I’d advise you to skip the next paragraph.)

Anyway, things finally wrap up as the sixth girl is being photographed after being captured and tied up. Luckily for her, that imbecile of a detective has finally pieced together the answer to a mystery a mentally-deficient third-grader could have figured out faster, gotten up off her ass and out of that damn corner, and found the house where the shoot is taking place. Just as the girl is about to be killed, the detective makes her way to the house and... the ghosts of the murdered girls turn into an optical effect that kills the photographer and renders the detective character even more pointless than she was in the first place. Apparently her entire contribution to the film is being there to untie the last victim.

In all fairness, I must mention that there are moments in here that evidence some talent. Production-wise, at least, things aren’t all that bad. The film is competently lit, shot, and edited for the most part; and most of the murders do use handheld photography well to ratchet up the creepiness. There are a couple of all right gore effects, too; and the finale’s monster, while strange-looking, is effective. The demise of the photographer, too, is appropriate in a way that evidences a surprising glimmer of potential storytelling intelligence. If only it had been preceded by a story and not just a series of events...

As for technical issues, the film is presented full-frame, which is surely its correct ratio, though I wouldn’t have cared all that much if it weren’t. Things look clean and crisp, and my copy had a lovely “for promotional use only” warning emblazoned in giant letters over the entire film (which you will no doubt recognize from the screenshots). The only extras on my promotional copy were a trailer that showed little to no sense of pacing and a pretty stupid promo (that tries way too hard to be cool) for Brain Damage Films.