FBI agent Stephen Broderick (Scott
Glenn) is aided in his search for a serial killer by his hyper
intelligent son, Jesse. (Jesse Cameron-Glickenhaus)
I saw this movie when it came out, but really only remembered two things, this guy getting impaled on deer
antlers Quigley-style—
--and that even as a teenager I thought
that the Jesse character was wildly implausible.
Slaughter of the Innocents showed up on
the “Hot New Singles” wall at Blockbuster one day. This was a
rack reserved for one-off releases to make sure they didn’t get
buried under the popular titles that took up the bulk of our shelf
space. I kept my eye on this singles rack because it often featured
the indie & foreign stuff like Man Bites Dog, Happy Birthday
Türke, Mindwarp and Gas, Food Lodging just to name a few.
As for this one, it’s
not too hard to figure out that Glickenhaus wanted to cash in on the
success of The Silence of the Lambs here. Aside from casting Scott
Glenn and the similar sounding title, it’s also an
FBI-hunt-for-a-serial-killer flick. Just imagine Lambs without
Hannibal Lecter and if Clarice Starling was a ten-year-old boy and
you’ll get a decent approximation of the subject matter.
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Jesse Cameron-Glickenhaus as Jesse in Slaughter of the Innocents. |
So the bulk of my thoughts on this
movie are going to be about Jesse – who was played by the director’s
own son and actually does a hell of a job considering all he goes through in
this movie – and I’m not sure where to start so I’ll just dive
right in. This kid was basically the Encyclopedia Brown of true crime
knowledge and, between school and little league, seemed to be able to
out-sleuth the FBI. I'm torn between which element was least likely,
that a kid would even be capable of this or that his father seemed to
be actively encouraging it. Seriously, Broderick and his son had the
weirdest relationship…
But I haven’t gotten the best part, as Jesse also happened to be a tech guru, carrying around the nineties equivalent of
an iPad and was always connected to his fact-spewing super PC. I mean, the voice recognition on this thing was better than Alexa's today!
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“You have a collect call from a Mr. D.E. Machina.” |
But it wasn’t just the dynamic between
father and son that was confounding, as there were several scenes that just struck me as
odd, like when a young girl got kidnapped from a gas station parking
lot and the attendant seemed more upset about it than the mother. Or
when Broderick and his team (that included Aaron Eckhart in his first role) snuck up on a Neo-Nazi suspect’s cabin and he was just
hanging out in full SS garb. On the other hand, the movie did have
Hercules’ Kevin Sorbo in his most un-Hercules role ever so…
Lastly, I wasn’t surprised when Imdb
told me this premiered on television because this movie contained the
most generic nineties score I think I’ve ever heard. Having said
all of that, Slaughter of the Innocents was a functional movie, but
it lacked the grit-infused energy that Glickenhaus’ action-oriented titles from
the eighties like The Soldier and Shakedown possessed. It’s just a
shame that the problematic wonder kid element was also the only thing
that made this movie at all unique.