Slaxx

Everyone has that one subject in horror that automatically churns their stomach. Spiders, sharks broken bones, ghosts, we've all got 'em. For me, I will admit, it's clothes stores. It's instinctual. Clothes shopping is the worst, not least because you have no idea who wore that jacket before you tried it on, and then there are sizes, and colors, and what the hell is a boot cut anyway? So goofy fashion horror Slaxx was already pressing my buttons before the first victim was drained and bifurcated by a pair of bloodthirsty jeans.

Romane Denis proved she knows her way around the cinematic minimum wage sales floor in very modern sex comedy Slut in a Good Way. Yet idealistic and perky Libby, Slaxx's obvious final girl, couldn't be any further away from that film's caustic radical Mégane. She has always dreamed of getting a job at her favorite store, the ethically scrupulous and fashion-first CCC, and she's landed it on the best day possible: Sunday. That's because Sunday is the day before Monday Madness, when their new self-adjusting jeans are arriving. No more worrying about that extra couple of weekend pounds, or needing to grab a belt: these are the ultimate in figure-hugging. Unfortunately for the wearers, that body shaping shifts into mangling, as this rotten cotton dispatches the overnight staff in increasingly creative and gut-twisting fashions.

Slaxx does a surprisingly sparkling job of melding workplace comedy with '90s-style silly gore. Director Elza Kephart (who co-wrote the script with Patricia Gomez) isn't afraid to lean into the absurdity of murderous apparel, with the central joke basically being the dad pants from Onward putting minimum wage workers on a radical weight loss diet (how much does a head weigh, anyway?).

Strip that away, and there's a fun layer of a workplace comedy, a scathing take on the ridiculous rules of faceless but heavily-branded corporations, and the stereotypes that working in a mall store will attract. There's the surly "just here for the money" shelf stacker (Bhojani), the overly-ambitious manager who may be an ancestor of Aliens's Carter Burke (Donahue), and the vapid wannabe fashionista (Talbot): Yet Gomez and Kephart throw in enough nods to modern corporate culture, including an irksome influencer (Anderson) and an aphorism-spouting messianic CEO (Bogaert) to make it feel as timely as Clerks and Waiting ... were when they arrived. That last comparison has another level, as Denis hits a similar vibe to the restaurant comedy's star Anna Farris when she channeled her studied dopiness in the Scary Movie franchise, and without her Slaxx would just be a heartless satire. Instead, she and the gore bring a spoonful of sugar to the medicine of the social commentary.

Of course, the great grand daddy of mall horror is (no, not Chopping Mall) Romero's Dawn of the Dead, with its vicious subtext about America's brainless commitment to commercialism and consumerism, and Slaxx doesn't avoid any of that. Instead, it runs head first at the trusting ethical consumerism that people use to excuse their slavish dedication to the next tiny modification to a hem line. It may stumble into heavy-handed moralizing around the checkout, but Slaxx is definitely a good look.

Available now to stream on Shudder.