🔪 Slaxx Review (2020): When Killer Jeans Attack
My Rating: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ☆ 4.5/5
This Slaxx review heads inside a trendy clothing store where the hottest new product on the shelves has a serious attitude problem. A pair of possessed blue jeans goes on a killing spree, and the staff is locked inside with it overnight. It sounds like a joke, and the movie knows it. But under all that denim and blood is a sharp, funny, and surprisingly smart Canadian horror comedy.
Slaxx Review: The 2020 Movie Overview
A pair of possessed blue jeans goes on a killing spree inside a fashionable clothing store.
It sounds ridiculous, and that is precisely what makes Slaxx such an unusual entry in modern horror.
Slaxx is a Canadian horror comedy.
Killer.
Jeans.
Not killer in the fashion magazine sense.
Killer as in actually killing people.
The idea sounds like something you’d come up with at two in the morning after too many horror movies.
Somehow, it became a real movie.
And a pretty good one.
This Slaxx review explains why a movie about murderous pants deserves a spot on your horror shelf.
Montreal filmmaker Elza Kephart directed it and co-wrote it with Patricia Gomez.
It’s Kephart’s third feature, following Graveyard Alive and Go in the Wilderness.
Gomez also produced the film alongside Anne-Marie Gélinas, whose credits include the cult favorite Turbo Kid.
That’s a team that knows its way around low-budget genre fun.
Underneath the blood, there’s also a sharp workplace satire.
Anyone who has ever worked retail will recognize this store.
The forced smiles.
The corporate slogans.
The manager who treats a product launch like a moon landing.
Then add a pair of murderous pants.
Canada has a proud history of strange and memorable horror.
Bob Clark gave us Black Christmas back in 1974.
David Cronenberg spent decades making audiences squirm.
Ginger Snaps turned werewolves into a coming-of-age story.
Pontypool found horror inside a small-town radio station.
Slaxx fits right into that tradition of Canadian filmmakers taking a weird idea and running with it.
Slaxx had its world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal on August 23, 2020, during the festival’s online edition. It opened in Canada on September 11, 2020. Shudder brought it to the United States, the UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand on March 18, 2021. It runs a lean, quick-moving length of under 80 minutes.
This Slaxx review stays spoiler free.
The Story: A Fashion Store With a Deadly Secret
Libby McClean is having the best day of her life.
It’s her first day at Canadian Cotton Clothiers.
CCC is the trendy clothing chain that sells itself as ethical, organic, and good for the planet.
Libby believes every word.
Bless her.
She’s an idealistic teenager who thinks she has joined a company that is changing the world.
She’s memorized the mission statement.
She’s ready to smile at every customer.
She’s the kind of new hire every manager dreams about.
Her first shift happens to land on a very big night.
The store is preparing to launch a brand-new line of jeans.
These aren’t ordinary jeans.
They’re designed to change shape and flatter whoever wears them.
One pair to flatter them all.
The company is betting big on them.
So is the store manager.
If the launch goes well, everybody looks good.
If it goes badly, somebody is getting blamed.
Nobody expects the product itself to be the problem.
To get ready, the staff is locked inside the store overnight to set up the new collection.
No customers.
No going home.
Just a small crew, a lot of display tables, and a big corporate deadline.
It’s the kind of setup horror fans know well.
A group of people.
One building.
No easy way out.
Usually it’s a cabin, a space station, or a shopping mall full of zombies.
This time it’s a clothing store with very good lighting.
Then employees start disappearing.
Bloodily.
Something in that new shipment is not happy.
How it happened, and why, are questions the movie answers in its own time.
I’m leaving those answers right where they belong.
On the shelf.
A Killer Pair of Jeans Steals the Show
Let’s talk about the real star.
A pair of blue jeans.
Nobody inside them.
No legs.
No feet.
No face.
Just denim, moving on its own.
They crawl.
They stalk.
They leap.
They strangle.
And when they get hungry, things get messy.
On paper, this is the silliest monster imaginable.
On screen, the filmmakers commit completely.
Nobody winks at the camera.
The jeans are treated as a genuine predator.
That’s the secret to making a ridiculous idea work.
Play it straight, and let the audience do the laughing.
The jeans even have personality.
They have moods.
They have preferences.
They definitely have opinions about the people around them.
That commitment is the heart of this Slaxx review.
There’s something especially funny about the choice of villain, too.
Blue jeans are about as American as it gets.
Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis patented riveted work pants back in 1873.
Miners wore them.
Cowboys wore them.
Rebels wore them.
Eventually everybody wore them.
Today you can find a pair in almost every closet in North America.
That’s a lot of potential suspects.
Nearly 150 years later, a Canadian horror movie decided they should start wearing us.
Horror has a long history of killer objects.
Dolls.
Cars.
Trucks.
A bed that eats people in Death Bed: The Bed That Eats.
A laundry press in Tobe Hooper’s The Mangler.
A tire with psychic powers in Rubber.
A haunted dress in Peter Strickland’s In Fabric.
Collectors who dig through the strange end of the horror shelf will recognize the family resemblance.
Slaxx proudly joins the club.
You’ll never look at your dresser drawer the same way again.
Practical Effects, Blood, and Killer Denim
Slaxx earns a lot of goodwill by doing things the old-fashioned way.
Blood Brothers FX created the killer jeans and their victims.
That’s the Canadian effects team behind Turbo Kid and Blood Quantum.
They know how to make a mess.
The jeans themselves were designed and made by Naked & Famous Denim, a Canadian premium denim brand.
So yes, the monster was made by an actual jeans company.
That’s a casting decision you don’t see every day.
Kephart has said she’s a fan of the physical effects in ’80s and ’90s horror movies.
The plan was to do as much as possible practically.
You can feel that on screen.
When the jeans move, they move like a real object in a real room.
They have weight.
They catch the light.
They bunch and twist like real fabric.
Your brain knows it’s a trick, but your eyes keep buying it anyway.
Watching the jeans crawl across a floor is equal parts creepy and hilarious.
That’s not easy to pull off with a pair of pants.
Performer Marie-Claude Labrecque is even credited as Slaxx.
Digital effects house Alchemy 24 added visual effects touches where the practical work needed help.
The bloody deaths are where Slaxx really cuts loose.
Severed limbs.
Gushing blood.
Bodies folded in ways bodies should never fold.
This is not a gentle comedy.
The gore is played for gasps and laughs at the same time.
Sometimes you’ll do both in the same second.
The effects team clearly had a good time.
Every kill seems designed to top the one before it.
That kind of escalation is exactly what a horror comedy needs.
There’s also something wonderfully wrong about the setting.
Clean white walls.
Neatly folded stacks of clothing.
Perfect display tables.
Then blood splashes across all of it.
A bright, tidy store makes every red stain stand out.
Somebody is going to have a very long cleanup shift in the morning.
The Cast and Characters
Romane Denis plays Libby McClean.
Denis is a Montreal actress who has been performing since childhood. Her credits include Louis Cyr and My Salinger Year.
She makes Libby’s wide-eyed enthusiasm believable, and that matters.
Libby is the audience’s way into the store.
She believes in the company.
We get to watch that belief get tested.
Denis plays that journey without turning Libby into a joke.
You root for her even when she’s being a little naive.
That makes the darker turns hit a lot harder.
Brett Donahue plays Craig, the store manager.
Craig is the kind of boss who memorizes the corporate handbook and expects you to do the same.
He’s desperate for the launch to go perfectly.
Even when the bodies start piling up.
Especially then.
Donahue gives him a frantic, smiling desperation that is genuinely funny.
He’s the guy who would check whether a corpse violated the dress code.
Sehar Bhojani plays Shruti, the cynical veteran employee.
Shruti has worked here long enough to stop believing anything the company says.
She does as little as possible, and she isn’t shy about it.
Every store has a Shruti.
You probably liked her best.
Bhojani’s deadpan delivery steals more than a few scenes.
The rest of the staff includes Kenny Wong as Lord, Tianna Nori as Barb Lubotski, Jessica B. Hill as Hunter, and Hanneke Talbot as Jemma.
Erica Anderson plays Peyton Jules, and Stephen Bogaert plays Harold Landsgrove.
The workplace relationships are half the fun.
Rivalries.
Gossip.
Petty power trips.
Coworkers who only pretend to like each other.
These people make each other’s night worse long before the jeans show up.
That’s an important choice.
When the killing starts, we already know who everybody is.
We know who we’re rooting for.
We definitely know who we’re rooting against.
The horror comes from the denim.
The comedy comes from the people.
The Dark Humor Behind the Fashion Industry
Under all that denim, Slaxx has something on its mind.
CCC loves to talk about how ethical it is.
Organic.
Sustainable.
Fair.
Every slogan says the company cares.
The question the movie keeps asking is simple.
Does it?
Slaxx pokes at consumer culture too.
Customers want the newest thing, the lowest price, and the perfect fit.
Nobody asks where it came from.
Nobody asks who made it.
Nobody asks what it really cost.
Most of us are guilty of it.
A sale sign goes up, and the questions go right out the window.
The movie doesn’t preach about that.
It just holds up a mirror and lets the jeans do the talking.
It also skewers the way retail workers get treated.
Long hours.
Impossible goals.
Smile no matter what.
Anybody who has run a shop knows how much pressure a big product launch can put on a small crew.
Locked in overnight to meet a corporate deadline?
That’s a horror movie before anything supernatural even happens.
The film ties its message directly to the jeans themselves.
How exactly is one of its best surprises, and I’m not touching it.
Satire done right doesn’t stop the fun.
It sharpens it.
The best horror has always had something to say.
Dawn of the Dead put zombies in a shopping mall to poke at consumer culture back in 1978.
They Live turned billboards into alien propaganda.
Slaxx takes that same tradition and aims it straight at fast fashion.
You laugh at the gore.
Then the movie gives you something to think about on the drive home.
Maybe even the next time you check a clothing label.
What Works and What Falls Short
Here’s how Kilroy sees it.
What works:
The premise. It’s bold, and the movie never backs away from it.
The practical effects. The jeans look real because they are real.
The gore. It’s generous, creative, and staged for maximum reaction.
Brett Donahue. His Craig is a comedic highlight from his first scene to his last.
Romane Denis. She gives the movie a real heart in the middle of all that blood.
The pace. At under 80 minutes, it never overstays its welcome.
The satire. It has real teeth without turning into a lecture.
The setting. A spotless retail store is a fresh place to stage a slaughter.
What falls short:
Some of the side characters are thin.
With a cast this size and a runtime this short, a few employees exist mostly to meet the jeans.
The tone swings hard between silly and serious, and not every swing lands cleanly.
A few gags run a little longer than they need to.
And if you have zero tolerance for camp, the premise may lose you before the satire kicks in.
None of that sinks it.
These are small complaints about a movie that clearly knows its audience.
Most horror comedies struggle to be funny and scary at the same time.
Slaxx manages both more often than not.
That’s harder than it looks.
The bottom line of this Slaxx review is simple. The movie does exactly what it set out to do, and it does it with style.
Final Thoughts 4.5/5
This one earns a 4.5 out of 5 from Kilroy. Wrapping up this Slaxx review, Elza Kephart’s killer jeans movie delivers far more than its goofy premise promises. The practical effects are messy fun, the cast plays it straight, and the fashion industry satire bites hard. It’s short, bloody, and smarter than it has any right to be.
“A gloriously gory, sharply funny horror comedy that takes killer jeans seriously.”
ML Lamp, Kilroy Was Here Shop
Slaxx asks a question nobody thought horror needed to ask.
What if your jeans wanted you dead?
Then it answers with buckets of blood.
The killer denim is ridiculous.
The movie knows it.
That’s exactly why it works.
Underneath the gore is a pointed look at fast fashion and the people who pay the real price for it.
Enough laughs?
Yes.
Enough gore?
Absolutely.
Enough imagination?
It turned a pair of pants into a monster.
That’s imagination.
It belongs on the same shelf as the strangest killer-object movies ever made.
And it might be the smartest one of the bunch.
Horror fans who like their scares with a side of laughs should grab a seat.
Just maybe skip the denim that night.
Wear sweatpants.
They seem friendlier.
Next time a new pair of jeans feels a little too tight, check the label before you check the mirror.
