SLAXX (2020)

 

(Director: Elza Kephart. Screenplay by Elza Kephart and Patricia Gomez, billed as Patricia Gomez Zlatar.)

Review

During the set-up for an instore unveiling of a groundbreaking new line of jeans (Super Shapers), a new employee, Libby McClean (Romane Denis), discovers that her and her co-workers are being picked off by a pair of supernaturally possessed jeans.

SLAXX is an adroit, darkly fun (despite its brightly lit environs), sometimes bloody horror comedy that, structured by Kephart and Gomez’s spot-on screenplay, balances sketched-out, well-acted characters (who are worth rooting for or hissing at), laugh-out-loud humor, visually satisfying FX, horror elements and set-ups as well as a potent social conscience that is deftly presented in a way that the satirical SLAXX entertains and educates in equal measure. This is one of the best horror comedies I’ve seen in a long time, and one of the best fun-horror flicks of 2020.

Notable performers include: Stephen Bogaert (AMERICAN PSYCHO, 2000); Elizabeth Neale (MOTHER!, 2017); and fabricator/puppeteer/special FX supervisor Marie-Claude Labrecque as Slaxx.