Slaxx

Slaxx is so unpleasantly smug, I want to spend the next 20 years becoming a world-renowned engineer so I can invent an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind machine and erase all my memories of ever watching it. It’s about a killer pair of pants that run amuck in a clothing store, a very fun idea that writer/director Elza Kephart bungles to an almost impressive degree. It definitely delivers on its premise, I’ll give it that; those pants brutally murder a surprising amount of people. But the film otherwise just doesn’t work, with slick but empty direction, clunky pacing that makes it feel so much longer than its brief 77 minute running time, and a whole bunch of insufferable characters who act like they were written by aliens who briefly observed how humans interact but don’t quite have it all figured out. It’s certainly possible to make a solid movie featuring heightened, stylized characterization (I’m thinking about another recent film revolving around a killer garment, In Fabric, which was superior to this one on every level), but Slaxx never even remotely pulls it off. It’s brutal to sit through.

* out of ****