Influencers would make great cannon fodder for slasher features. Issues around giving them personalities are cut through because their personality is whatever their Instagram projects. At least that is the heavy lifting on display in hosting another bland variety of gutsy kills and choppy camerawork. Slayers may have Thomas Jane front and centre, but it does not have much else. Vampires and their influences on the world are shown in some choppy and very dull opening credits that provide a car crash mash-up of knights, cavemen and the elusive, fanged beasts. K. Asher Levin lays on a thick dubstep soundtrack and a self-serving fourth-wall-breaking period for Elliot Jones (Jane).
Such a collection of tongue-in-cheek twists and grating dialogue that proves its narrator as someone cool rather than anything of actual value provides a sound and style closer to that of Castle Crashers than anything else. Stream Team and its members are as annoying as expected. That is likely the point. Throughout Slayers is an understanding of what makes low-budget features so poor when they’re thrown into the action-packed or thrilling chills of horror. These are caricatures, not characters. There is a display throughout that hopes to chastise the gluttony of celebrities with frequent breaks in pace to showcase how expensive a couch is or how nice the clothing is. They are jabs that break up the pace terribly but are the only narrative originality to be found. A shame, since it is done with no hint of irony or exploration of theme in sight.
Some violence here or there relies on some absolutely terrible prosthetics and a modern revision of the vampire as villain. An overt and borderline dullard sexualisation of the meathead characters that come and go as quickly as the choppy editing can manage. Lucid montage shots filtered in with dubstep tracking do create that comedic element found fun by those that have had their brain stirred into mush by quick-cut edits. There is no comedy in Slayers, no real comedy anyway. No punchy dialogue or expressive notions of any real quality to come from performances. Moments that feel edited like a Ratatat video, sleek white and dull with red lights to infect some falsified feel of horror. Useless. Blood and gore splash across the screen so frequently that an audience not suffering from desensitisation will find themselves completely removed from the action anyway.
Even worse than that is Jane, whose sporadic appearances here are underutilised and as dull as you could expect. Those around him and supporting his performance are as ridiculous as they are tremendously dense. A hatchet job of the criticisms Levin hopes to deploy, with a stylish decision to replicate and copy remnants of Resident Evil and Ready or Not. Backstories and edits that just look poor. Painted on wounds, overlays of Instagram feeds and the passive comments of millions create an unfocused, middle-aged jab at social media that neither understands it nor tries to. Slayers is a waste of potentially solid character work and a premise that, in the right hands, would not have felt like Willy’s Wonderland.
