Slayers is a vampire parody that hits upon every wannabe social media influencer trope from tik tok to twitch streamers...and even tv.
We find ourselves following a collective of influencers, who call themselves "The Stream Team", on their journey to meet a powerful and influential former record turned television executive slash real estate developer, who gaslights the public by fashioning himself as a fake woke eco-warrior.
He pretends to want to recruit these social media icons to take over his company.
But, really...he and his friends are just vampires, who want to harvest them for their blood.
Being a parody, the cringe characters come off as particularly annoying.
But this is clearly part of the design.
The narrator and protagonist of the film is a rough and tumble vampire hunter who lives and operates out of his RV.
He acts as a parody of internet conspiracy theorists, after being initiated into the such a life, when his rockstar daughter was lured in by the same reclusive billionaire that is targeting this group of influencers...only to be killed and harvested herself.
He tried to intervene and save her...but he was too late.
Inevitably leading him down this benevolent path of vengeance.
The only one he is able to convince, however, is a completive Modern Warfare twitch streamer...who watched one of her friends being killed by one of these vampires.
So, obviously, they team up to try and stop them...in John Carpenter fashion.
But they take way too long to develop the storyline...wasting too many minutes with pointless filler designed to lure in the attention of stream viewers.
By the time they get through this, they are already introducing the twist...but things are just too fast paced for any of it to really settle in...before we're into the action.
All of which is portrayed as a video game...streamed for an attentive internet audience...of course.
Ironically, though, the vampires suck.
They just aren't cool in any conceivable manner.
Plus, the action is super lame.
Further irony being derived from the fact that the entire allure of streamers is their character development...based around the idea that we are constantly able to tune in on their lives in the most intimate settings.
Whereas there is virtually no character development here...at all...so you never really care about any of the characters in the film, at any given point.
To their credit, they do make an effort to give the characters a backstory, but there is far too much going on for it to have the intended effect.
Making the whole thing feel empty and soulless.
It just plods on, and when it's over, it's almost like it didn't even happen at all...because you never gave a damn to begin with.
Which leaves you feeling like watching it at all was just a complete waste of time.
Is that the commentary they were going for?
Either way, the final third of the film is just bad.
Garbage action sequences aside...they keep stopping things to insert lore...but it just doesn't work...and kills any semblance of flow they still had going for it.
So chock up it's failure to bad writing and really poor construction.
Cause in the end, this movie just sucks.
1.5 out of 10.
