Welcome to another movie review here on the Hive Blockchain.
I am Movie Monkey and am a true film addict.
Hope you enjoy my reviews. May contain spoilers.
Slaxx
- Genre:Horror/Comedy
- Release Date: 11th September 2020
- Director: Elza Kephart
- Starring: Romane Denis, Erica Anderson, Hanneke Talbot, Kenny Wong, Brett Donahue, Sehar Bhojani, Stephen Bogaert, Jessica B. Hill.
Libby McClean is a young woman who has been wanting to join the workforce of her favourite clothing store, Canadian Cotton Clothiers (CCC), since she turned sixteen years old, and today is the day she finally does.
CCC is an high end fashion store which prides itself as being a Fairtrade, Sweatshop free, and 120% Organic company.
It uses high quality cotton that has been hand picked from the fields of India.
Libby is stunned to be told by her fellow employee Lord, that she must always wear company clothing whilst at work and that the clothing she is currently wearing, although CCC branded and purchased last month, is actually already way out of date by being three seasons behind. They must only wear clothing from the current season and she must buy new clothes before her night shift starts at 9pm.
(As someone who used to be a fashion retail manager for many years, I can confirm that this is actually a true reflection of the uniform policies, which causes you to be very skint!)
Libby buys new clothes at full price as she disappointingly does not yet qualify for the staff discount.
The night shift will be responsible for the launch of the new seasons clothes and will need to remove old stock and replace with the new, ready for the eager customers in the morning.
The store, taking the launch extremely serious, will be in lockdown until 8am which means the doors will be locked and the system cannot be over ridden. The only time it will disconnect and unlock the doors will be at midnight when the social media star Peyton Jewels will be visiting the store for an exclusive look at the new season.
Courtesy of YouTube
A top company big wig comes into the store to give a motivational speech to the staff about the importance of a successful launch and the new jeans that they will be revealing.
Jemma, another employee, has already secretly took a pair of jeans from the stockroom and is wearing them.
The jeans are named as 'Super Shapers' and feature state of the art technology which enables them to automatically adapt to your body size. They are the first ever gender inclusive jeans and everybody wants them!
Jemma starts to feel pain around her stomach. Thinking that she must be due her period, she rushes off to the toilet and goes into a cubicle. However it isn't what she expected. The jeans start to tighten around her waist, and get tighter and tighter before they eventually cut her in half in a very bloody and gruesome scene.
The jeans start to slowly pick the staff members off one by one in brutal ways which are both violent yet funny.
Libby is sent to look for the missing staff members and finds Jemma's dismembered body stuffed under the toilet sink.
The Manager, Craig, passes it off as a suicide and tells Libby not to tell anyone else about it as they need to carry on the evenings work and get the new season launched.
They hide her body in a storage cart and wheel it out to the refuse area.
As more staff are killed by the jeans, Libby starts to get increasingly panicky and tells Craig that they should phone the police.
Not wanting to jeopardise the season launch and potentially ruin his chances of the promotion he has just applied for, Craig hits her around the head with a mannequin leg and she falls to the floor unconscious.
The doors unlock and Peyton arrives to film her exclusive viewing of the super shaper jeans. But, yes you've guessed it, as her assistant films the promo video on her camcorder, Peyton is killed by the jeans, followed by everyone else who is on the shop floor, apart from Craig who has ran away and locked himself in the office and Shruti who is listening and singing to Bollywood music on her earphones. As she sings, the jeans dance.
The jeans then attach themselves to a mannequin bust and paints a bindi on it's head using blood.
Shruti who is unaware of what's been happening has taken herself off to the staff room for her break.
Libby comes to and finds the camcorder. She then finds Shruti in the staff room and shows her the carnage that has been filmed. They realise that Peyton's promo visit was meant to last for an hour, so the doors will not automatically lock again until 1am. They dash through the store and to the front doors but they don't make it in time before the doors lock themselves again.
They realise that they are now stuck in the store until 8am. They find Craig in the office and he suggests that it's all just mass hallucination. They look on the CCTV and see the massacre that it has captured. After looking at the footage of the jeans dancing, Libby realises that Shruti was not killed because she was singing an Indian song.
Libby holds Shruti's phone to the store intercom and plays the Bollywood music and the jeans/mannequin starts dancing again.
Shruti speaks in Hindi and asks it who it is and what it wants.
The mannequin picks up a dead persons hand and writes on the wall in Hindi in response. They are called Keerat and they died in a machinery accident after picking cotton in India for the company, which resulted in her blood being splattered all over the cotton which in turn was then used to make the jeans.
She was only thirteen years old.
Craig confesses that the company uses child labour and employee exploitation and that the cotton is grown using genetically modified seeds.
Keerat wants justice. Libby and Shruti unlock the office door and walk out into the corridor to speak with Keerat.
They ask that if they agree to show the world her story, will she agree to stop killing people?
But before they can get a response, Craig jumps in from behind them and sprays Keerat with a fire extinguisher, scaring her away.
Angry with Craig for sabotaging their intended truce they ask how many more Super Shaper jeans there are instore?
175 pairs!
They are plunged into darkness as the lights suddenly go out. Craig runs off and the girls follow a blood trail to try and find Keerat.
In the stockroom they find some pairs of jeans slurping at the pools of blood that surrounds a pile of dead staff bodies. Craig reappears and locks the cage like door so that they can't get out. He wants the camera from them.
Craig stabs Shruti and kills her. He then sees that the camcorder she is holding has had the SD card removed.
He strangles Libby until she passes out and then the hoard of jeans surround him, kill him and then eat the flesh from his bones leaving just his skeleton behind.
Libby comes to and the jeans all walk passed her, leaving her unharmed.
It's 7.58 am and Libby rushes to the front of the store where she can hear that there are tons of eager customers all waiting to come inside to see the new collection and the new jeans.
She begs the jeans not to kill the people as they have done nothing wrong but as the doors unlock and the public flood through the door, she gets knocked to the floor and hits her head causing a severe bleed.
As she lays on the tiled floor slowly dying, SD card in hand, she can hear the jeans massacre the crowd.
This movie was both fun and gory mixed into one riotous and enjoyable watch.
Being a comedy/Horror I knew there would be an element of quirkiness to it which some people could deem as annoyingly cheesy, but I loved it.
The gore level was just right and broadened on pathetically entertaining in some scenes, but in a good way!
The factor of the negative take on the fashion industry with regards to it's (sometimes) unethical approach and greed for profit was good and the view of the store managers/regional managers etc who will do anything to see their business succeed was also a great factor to the storyline.
Young naive woman enters fashion industry and learns of it's less than desirable and hidden secrets in a harsh and blood splatteringly supernatural way!
The storyline was great and kept me interested to see what would happen next and both the characters and their portrayal was fab.
If you like strange little peculiar movies with on point weird humour and gore then you'll no doubt like this one too. Let me know what you think!
(A Shudder Original)
Movie Monkey Rating: 4.5
