FANTASIA 2020: Slaxx
fantasiaIn Slaxx, new hire Libby (Romane Denis) joins one of the many store teams for the fashion company Canadian Cotton Clothiers, on the eve of their Monday Madness event. The chain stocks organic, GMO-free, fair-trade, sweatshop-free, ethically sourced clothing at low prices and their brand new Super Shaper denim is joining their line. The launch is kept very hush-hush, with the entire store in lockdown as its employees prepare for the new line. However, things quickly turn ugly when a pair of those new jeans turn out to be possessed and starts killing the trapped workers.
Libby is bubbly and overjoyed — bordering on naïve — to be working for such an excellent company. She is all smiles as she tries to fit into her new position, bouncing between new tasks. The more seasoned workers are caricatures of retail employees, some being embittered, others competitive and another simply doesn’t care about her job at all. They only exist to serve as victims of the possessed, bloodthirsty denim. This particular Canadian Cotton Clothiers location is helmed by the aspiring regional manager, Craig (Brett Donahue), who serves as the film’s antagonist and is blindly loyal to the company, willing to do anything to get promoted — including covering up the murders. He refuses to break lockdown procedures, even when corpses start turning up and he delves further and further into delusion as he tries to keep his employees in check.
The most impressive aspect of Slaxx is the practical effects used to orchestrate the horror and gore throughout the film. The haunted pants come to life through a puppeteering team led by Marie-Claude Labrecque. The team give the inanimate object emotion by moving and posing it in certain ways to create the essence of a face. The pants look joyful when they’re dancing along to Bollywood music and enraged as they crawl across the floor to their next victim. Puppeteering also plays a role in the intricate murders. Some scenes simply find the pants devouring victims through its mouth, while others are more elaborate, using methods of strangulation. The puppeteering and special effects team make the haunted nature of the pants significantly more believable through their talent.
SPOILERS AHEAD
The biggest problem with Slaxx happens to be its writing, more so the social message behind it. Written by directors Elza Kephart and Patricia Gomez Zlatar, Slaxx tries to provide a somewhat logical reasoning for the haunted possession of the Super Shaper jeans, instead of brushing it off as a kooky, unexplained occurrence. The jeans are revealed to be possessed by Keerat (Pritha Mazumdar), a child worker who picked cotton in India and was killed after falling into machinery. Canadian Cotton Clothiers lied about its ethical background, providing no transparency into its supply chains and turning a blind eye to child labour.
The women of colour in this film are reduced to one-dimensional characters. Keerat is a victim of Canadian Cotton Clothiers unethical practices, but she is a silent victim. Keertat never speaks in the flashbacks of her life, the audience only sees her gruesome death. As the haunted pants Keerat is purely revenge motivated, communicating her rage through Hindi letters painted in blood. It is known that she likes dancing to Bollywood songs because she dances along to the music pouring out of Shruti’s (Sehar Bhojani) earbuds and the characters confirm she is Indian because she draws a bindi in blood on a mannequin. Shruti only exists to translate the Hindi writing before being killed by her white male boss for trying to expose Canadian Cotton Clothiers. Some of the other characters happen to be Black and Asian but, again, they are merely caricatures of retail workers that exist to be killed by the jeans. These incidents show the necessity of not only having people of colour on screen but also working behind the scenes of film productions as well.
The fashion industry is well known to be one of the largest polluters of planet Earth, as well as being completely unethical; they are known for killing countless animals for fabric and exploiting workers in developing countries. Slaxx is meant to be a commentary on this issue but unfortunately is too simplistic. The film’s moral is essentially: “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.” Which is often used as a lazy excuse so people do not need to change personal behaviours but rather blame big companies. Change in both consumers and corporations is necessary to make a change in the fashion industry. Slaxx misses this mark and merely offers hopelessness instead.