Slaxx

Social satire and social commentary often go hand-in-hand in cinema, but they also require a deft touch. Movies like Night Of The Living Dead and its sequel Dawn Of The Dead, Get Out, The People Under The Stairs, even Scream 4, all use the framework of their movies to skewer society in a smart way. They use subtlety to get you to think, implying rather than telling you about the issues they're addressing, commenting on them and destroying them at the same time without feeling lecturing or preachy. In the wrong hands, though, you get movies like Red State, or the most recent remake of Black Christmas; movies that bludgeon you into submission with tone-deaf obviousness, clumsily-handled stereotypes, and nothing intelligent to say beyond "ISN'T THIS A BAD THING?!?". Slaxx very, very much wants to be in the former, but it's not. But I can't say it's in the latter either. It rests in an uncomfortable, awkward middle, trying to have too many ways. It wants to be silly and self-aware. It wants to be serious. It wants to be horrific. And it wants to have a point and drive home a message. No, not just one message; SEVERAL of them. And it accomplishes none of this very well. The movie's main character is a starry-eyed girl named Libby, who has always wanted to work at the Canadian Cotton Clothiers, a satire of stores like The Gap and Forever 21. The company is very vocal about their ethics, promoting every possible socially conscious agenda a clothing brand could have; fair-trade, no GMO's, no child labor, and so on. The company management pushes an image not just of family, but a near cult-like mentality, where slogans are repeated like mantras, and everything an employee does should be for the betterment of the store. Libby's first night coincides with a total merchandise flip to the new season, and the debut of new pants that are gender-neutral (?!?), and use buzzword-defined "technology" that gives anybody the body -- and especially ass -- that they've always wanted. A well-known YouTube fashion influencer is even stopping in at midnight while the store is in lockdown (a lockdown that somehow cuts off all cell phone and internet connection) to record a video hyping the unveiling of the new line-up. Libby, who is fully bought into the company's image and is believes working there is contributing to the betterment of the world at large, is overwhelmed. That's when the dead bodies start piling up. **SPOILER ALERT HERE** The jeans, it turns out, were made from GMO-enhanced cotton, using child labor. One child got pulled into the mechanized cotton gin by her head scarf and died. Now, she haunts the jeans and wants justice. She wants the company exposed for the hypocrites they are. There's a lot going on here. First, there's too many damned messages at work. The parody of the CCC is too over-the-top, with back-biting middle management all trying to sabotage one another to become regional manager, driven by a psychopath boss that is every drinks-the-Kool-Aid extremist corporate believer character turned up to 11. Nobody would work for someone like the boss here, but work they do, and it undercuts the believability of the corporation hiding behind empty virtue-signaling; everybody in the company is either a cult-like whackaloon, a slave-driving freak, or emotionally dead inside and going through the motions. SPECTRE in the James Bond movies isn't this overtly amoral. It renders the message about corporations latching onto trends and social awareness movements feel phony, because the CCC isn't believable. Likewise, the message about brand worship falls flat because Libby is a shell of a human being. She's either hopelessly naïve, or willfully ignorant. The use of the social media influencer amounts to nothing, because nobody in the store regards her as anything more than a promotional vehicle, not even Libby. So the "don't worship brands" message falls apart because it has nothing to back it up. And if there's an attempt at a message about body image, woof, that egg never hatches. Hard to make a statement about trendy clothing stores only catering to the super-skinny and the normal-bodied feeling pressured to conform when there isn't a single person in the movie whose clothing size can be counted on more than one hand. Add in how none of the characters have any depth to them at all. I've seen more character development in end-of-the-fad 80's slashers than this. AND THEN you have the ludicrous thread tying it all together: killer pants. They snarl. They somehow can tear off limbs and gnaw the meat off bones. They seem to have eyes. PANTS. I'M TALKING ABOUT PANTS HERE. They can splatter all the blood they want and make the death scenes deliciously visceral (and they do), but it doesn't change the fact that this movie either wants me to be scared of pants, or wants me to laugh at them. It never seems in on the joke, but it simply CAN. NOT. be trying to sell a pair of Levi's as a serious threat to life and limb. Not in a movie with So Many Important Things To Say. This movie is constantly working against itself, trying to decide what it wants to be, while putting up a roadblock in front of that decision at every turn. It's never boring, but it is just so frustrating, because there's just too much going on here. Maybe a more adept director could've balanced it, but this, this is just trying too many things at once. You want a Movie With A Message? Fine, go make that and ditch the killer pants, and don't make everything so damned on-the-nose. You want an OTT movie about homicidal jeans? Steer into the skid. You wanna be scary? Make the social commentary subtextual and give me a threatening villain. But this movie has a foot in both countries and lives in none, leaving it nothing more than a messy experiment gone wrong.