FILM REVIEW: SLAXX DIRECTED BY ELZA KEPHART

Unfortunately, the pseudo-serious shift does not take away from the cultural insensitivity, instead it magnifies the problems within the story more and the surface-level message it is trying to convey.

Slaxx
Director: Elza Kephart
Writers: Patricia Gomez, Elza Kephart
Starring: Romane Denis, Brett Donahue, Sehur Bhojani

When a possessed pair of jeans begins to kill the staff of a trendy clothing store, it is up to Libby, an idealistic young salesclerk, to stop its bloody rampage.

How much fabric can you get from a movie about a killer pair of jeans?

Like Rubber, In Fabric, Killer Sofa, and many others that have popped up over the last decade, Slaxx is the new installment into the killer inanimate objects’ subgenre (is that what it is being called?) that tries to stretch a feature’s worth of story out of an idea more suited for a 30-minute episode of Tales from the Crypt. Now with Rubber and In Fabric, they go into an esoteric, arthouse route to provide some reasoning for a killer tire or dress. Does it help them? For some. But, at least by embracing the absurdity with more meta and visual storytelling they create rules to forgive certain story issues.

Initially the story starts off with a young woman picking cotton on a farm in India specifically for Canadian Cotton Clothiers, a H&M or Forever 21-like company that prides itself on its organic farming and philanthropy, a scene replayed several times. After it is revealed this one of the experimental farms (whatever that may mean), we quickly jump to one of their stores in Canada that is preparing for Monday Madness (like Black Friday). The new hire, Libby (Denis) is ecstatic about joining the family due to the message they preach, but quickly finds out what life in the retail world is like. Her naivety is further diminished when a pair of the Super Shapers, pants that are meant to provide a perfect fit, begins killing the employees during their overnight lockdown. Also, the Super Shapers logo looks uncannily like the Nazi “SS” but that is not explored further.

For the first 30 minutes, the movie is a lot of fun as a satire on the retail world, with some silly kills to make gore hounds happy. There is a ton of dry, black comedy that comes from the store manager, Craig (Donahue), who, despite the death count, is trying to keep things on track so he can earn the regional manager promotion. During that beginning it feels like it could make its feature length by sticking to this black comedy approach of trying to coverup the murders for selfish reasons, since there have been many movies with that approach that work well.

However, early on the pants earns its four souls needed to… never really explained, which comes off as lazy worldbuilding, rather than earned ambiguity. And that is when the tonal shift comes to fill a run time. With the four souls required and most of the large cast are  then killed offscreen, Libby, Craig, and Shruti (Bhojani) learn the dark secret behind the Super Shapers origin and why they love Bollywood music. Sounds silly and slightly culturally insensitive, right? They actually take a serious turn in examining child labor and how these companies make their products, which is a noble topic to discuss, relevant, and crucial to buying anything. Unfortunately, the pseudo-serious shift does not take away from the cultural insensitivity, instead it magnifies the problems within the story more and the surface-level message it is trying to convey.

The movie was already accomplishing its commentary, while providing a ridiculous story about killer pants, but it feels like the writers decided to really drive the point home and make everything on-the-nose. It becomes boring, halting all momentum and unbearably longer than it should be. Also, on a technical note, a big chunk during this period gets really dark to where it was no better than watching with the video off.
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The longer I sit on Slaxx, the more issues I think of that could be examined, but for the audience’s sake it ultimately comes down to: if you’re going to do something like this, then make it tight, which should be common knowledge for any story, or at least make it ridiculous enough that the laws of the world you’re building are unreliable by their nature. Something that I was looking forward to and enjoyed for a bit, secured its spot as another idea that should have been left at the wouldn’t-it-be-funny-if stage.


1 1/2 out of 5