On paper[1] (and to be 100% fair, influenced by my experience with Rubber), Slaxx is nearly the perfect movie for me, and I’ve been waiting for it to come up in my Shudder queue for years, while also being halfway afraid that whole time it would leave the service and I wouldn’t notice the doom approaching. So maybe that is just too much pressure?

The barebones plot is, there’s a new hire at a clothing store (like, the Gap but higher end / bigger name), and she’s extremely excited to be joining the company family. They have all natural, fair trade, non-exploitation branding, and a Steve Jobs type at the helm, and she’s exactly the kind of idealistic final girl type who wants to be all in on that. So naturally on her first day, she is exposed to that store’s staff, and they are all pretentiously adversarial, with a manager who is far too focused on his own career to worry about doing anything for his employees, and by the time the situation is firmly established, you’re already rooting for the killer jeans to arrive.

But the thing is… it just never lands. Despite, or possibly because of, the underlying cause of the bloody spree, I never felt what the movie wanted me to feel. Like, perhaps if the retail peon level people had not mostly been despicable in the first place, I could have latched onto the “real” story, but since I already wanted to see a comeuppance, the one that was offered just didn’t fit. It’s like in Friday the 13th. Pamela Voorhees hits differently if this batch of counselors actually deserves her wrath, versus if they’re just playing out roles in the play in her head that has no bearing on reality.

Despite all of that, the murder jeans were pretty cool. Which is not nothing.

I guess what I’m saying is, if you’re going to indict an entire industry, you murder the people who created it and the people who support it, instead of spending most of your time murdering the people who just work there for minimum wage. And if you’re going to make your targets a bunch of jerks that you root for dying, then don’t pivot into indicting an industry. The puzzle pieces just don’t fit.

[1] I mean this metaphorically, yes, since there’s no literal paper on which the plot and details of Slaxx are written down for me, but I also mean it literally, insofar as see the poster.