Slaxx (2020)

directed by Elza Kephart

Canada

77 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I kept meaning to watch this, but wasn't in the right mood for it, which... I don't know what kind of mood you need to be in to watch a movie about a possessed pair of jeans that kills people, but I know I wasn't in it. But really, this isn't a mood movie at all; it's short, you don't have to prepare for it, and it's just good fun. Mostly.

Like most slashers, this isn't a very character-driven movie. It does have a decently-sized cast of distinct personalities, but their main purpose is to eventually get pantsed at some time or another, so you won't get too attached to them. Insofar as there is a main character, it's Libby, a new and very young employee at what we're told is a hugely popular clothing chain store. She has the misfortune of her first day falling on the night before "Monday Madness" - a big sale where the chain is about to unveil their revolutionary new product, and also have a popular influencer in to spread the word about it. Said product is a line of jeans that are supposed to use cutting-edge "thermal technology" to mold perfectly to your unique body shape, therefore being all-size and -gender inclusive. Because we know we're watching a movie about evil killer jeans, we of course know to be suspicious of this new product, but none of the characters do, leading to denim-fueled mayhem after hours.

I worked at Old Navy as my very first job when I was around the same age as the protagonist in this movie, so a lot of this was... nostalgic? Let's say nostalgic. The store is obviously not real, but the set decorators did such a great job of capturing that aesthetic via basically inventing it wholecloth that it might as well have been. It's a very immersive set, with color-coordinated marketing, posters, and even an invented terminology: I've never heard any retailer refer to each employee's specific work zone as their "ecosystem", but it sounds like the kind of positivity jargon a store manager would use. The attitudes of the employees range from Libby, bright-eyed and genuinely buying into the head of the chain's reputation for humanitarianism, to the awful wannabe regional manager, to Shruti, who has absolutely no time for any corporate spiel at all. Everybody else plays an important part in fleshing out the film, certainly, but they've pretty much got timers counting down to when they get killed.

The thing that makes this movie good is that is plays itself so incredibly straight. There is no sense that the people who made this were thinking "haha we're making a funny bad movie". This could so easily have gone the route of other "killer object" films in which there's either a deliberate attempt at goofiness or just a lack of caring about whether or not things came off as goofy, but it doesn't do any of that. In fact, it almost feels like it's trying its best not to be goofy. Slaxx wants you to take murderous denim seriously. I think this works so well in large part because of the kills, which are as gory and bloody as you'd expect them to be, but stop at the perfect point where the gore isn't gratuitous or out-of-place.

I also really appreciate the way the killer jeans are achieved onscreen. Everything else aside, if that had failed, this movie would have been nothing. From what I could tell, the jeans were operated with practical effects whenever possible. This is crucial because I feel like we all know by now that fabric is one of the most difficult things to get right with CGI, and in fact if you're looking at a particularly good CGI character, the thing that can immediately give it away as being fake is the clothing. So for the most part I think this was genuinely just jeans and wires, and it looks incredible. There's some shots, like a pair of the jeans scooting down an empty hallway lapping up a trail of blood, that are so unique I found myself lauding the sheer creativity of that, and the fact that cinema has never seen the likes of a pair of jeans scooting down a hallway lapping up blood and may never see it again. There's also a level of anthropomorphism here, though again, like most other things, Slaxx never takes this too far. The pockets look a little like eyes, and the waistband of course makes a gaping mouth, and it's perfect, but it's not used so often that your eyes immediately zero in on the jeans' "face" in every shot. If the face were too obvious, I think it would remove a little bit of the sense of danger and just become cute.

This movie's biggest shortfall, I think, is that it does actually try to play certain things a little too straight. I don't really have a place talking about this, because I'm a white American who has undoubtedly worn clothing produced in sweatshops and with child labor (though I do shop secondhand almost exclusively), but there's something about the way Slaxx tries to tackle those topics that doesn't feel quite right. Spoilers here, if a movie about killer jeans is something you're desperate to keep your mind untainted for. I'm just going to say it the way it is and you can decide how it sounds to you: The jeans are possessed by the spirit of a 13-year-old Indian girl, killed in a thresher accident while picking cotton on one of the clothing company's subcontracted farms. Close to the climax of the film, the jeans obtain a mannequin torso and attach it to itself (herself?) for increased mobility, and the first thing it does is daub a bindi on the mannequin's forehead with blood. Also, the first tipoff that the spirit in the jeans is in fact a former human is when the characters discover it has a soft spot for Bollywood songs. Now... like most other things in this movie, none of that is framed in a way that's obviously intended to be a joke. It is not making fun of Indian people, child labor, Bollywood music, or any of the other topics it covers. But at the same time, having that kind of thing in a comedy movie and covering it the way it's covered just feels... I don't know. If anything, I feel like it fails to deliver the impact of what it's trying to say. I don't need to be shown cruelty happening to know that it's happening, but the image that the film provides - a girl working in what look to be fairly nice conditions, who, through pretty much a total accident, ends up killed - feels like, if such a thing is possible, a deeply rose-tinted vision of child labor. 

And I really don't know what to make of the ending other than that a 13-year-old girl whose death was covered up by the people who were ultimately responsible for her safety is set up as a bad and hateful person who does the wrong thing. The army of jeans unleashes denim fury on a crowd of hapless customers, and the main character fails in convincing the girl's spirit to relent. I mean, in fairness, if the spirit had been appeased by sweet words and empty corporate promises, the film would have felt entirely toothless. But I feel like there could have been some middle ground, another way to conclude this story than casting an innocent girl as an obvious wrongdoer. So this is a pretty good movie and, as I said, lots of fun, it just feels like it stumbles a little in (what was almost definitely a well-intentioned) attempt to draw attention to real-world issues.