Slaxx

Ok this movie is completely aware of what it is. A horror comedy! The script is wonderful. The satire of the current retail culture is spot on. The special effects are hilarious. I love the kills in this movie. I didn't think I would be entertained by a killer pair of jeans but I was completely wrong. This movie was the perfect fit.

First there were movies. Then there were bad movies. Then there were movies that were so bad, they were good again. Then there were movies that knew they were bad. And we knew they knew. And they knew we knew they knew. And this brings us to Slaxx.

It's not the first film to knowingly embrace it's own stupidity. Coming in not quite as juvenile as Thankskilling, while not as meta as Rubber, Slaxx attempts to maintain the surface veneer of a genuine horror movie. Except it's a horror movie about pants, which aren't scary, cause they're pants, and this is where it becomes a comedy. The humour mostly plays off the deadpan reactions to the ludicrous scenario, and for the most part it lands.

Seeing as it's a parody, it can't really be faulted for it's rote characters. The overly obvious final girl seems necessary for the genre exercise, though the insufferable influencer hits the valley girl stereotype a little too on the nose and ends up being even more annoying than intended. The store manager is similarly over the top and maybe needlessly cartoonish, though his blatant denial of the obvious is the source of some of the best laughs.

I feel neutral about the moral bend of the film. Obviously, something this goofy doesn't need to have any truly deep things to say, and "sweatshops are bad" is pretty surface level social commentary. However, it's peppered in sparingly enough to not detract from the main attraction, and like, sweatshops are bad. Even though we seemed to have abandoned the cause in the 90s since we don't want to have to pay more for our shoes, it doesn't make it any less awful. Maybe a movie about killer jeans will finally wake up the world to enact long overdue social change! (It won't)

A cursed pair of form fitting blue jeans winds up on the shelf of a cheesy corporate clothing emporium and terrorizes any of the employees who dare to try them on as they set up for a major sale.

There's a lot of fun stuff about Slaxx and it works for about the first 50/60 minutes, but the last act runs out of steam right as it should be swinging from the rafters and it lost me.

There's a tinge of interesting social commentary, but starts trying to get a little too serious after an hour of absurdist humor and gore and the tones don't match. It's still worth a watch for fans of cheesy, funny horror movies.

Right before a new product launch, a killer pair of jeans eats all the staff at an upscale hipster store. The new girl has to stop the pants from getting out and killing more.

Here is a movie that had a nice over the top premise and manages to botch it in almost every way. First of all, it was shot way too drab and self-serious. The acting was all over the top goofy, and the attempts at a political message were way too heavy handed for what they were making. If you want to make a "Bad good" B movie you have to treat it seriously in presentation but lean into the goofiness, not do what this did and treat it goofy in presentation and lean into the seriousness. Tonally opposite of what it needed to be. Waste of a tremendous premise and a few cute scenes. BLEH.

A trendy, eco-conscious, holier-than-thou clothing chain experiences a reckoning at the hands (legs?) of some possessed jeans as its flagship store launches it's new denim collection. There's some attempted skewering of social media influencers, snobby store employees, and environmental hypocrites that doesn't really work as well as it should, but I was pretty happy with the gore and quick pace of the first two acts; unfortunately, the third seems to take forever even though the whole movie is only 77 minutes long. I enjoyed the VFX of the pants though, and there's a cute behind the scenes shot during the credits. Slaxx didn't wow me, but it was a pretty good fit for a rainy night at home.