Slice (2018)

31 Days Of Horror 13

Slice (2018)

Trailer

I ran a Buffy The Vampire Slayer game in 2014-15 set around the Graveyard Shift of a pizza place (running with the Doublemeat Palace metaphor of the crappy first job), and heard that someone had made a similar movie four years later. So seeing this was kind of a strange experience. And in part connected to that but I think not entirely, one I didn’t enjoy. I had unmet expectations from the premise, but also overall as a film. I don’t think this is just me thinking I did that better.

Slice has the supernatural in the open and ghosts have their own neighbourhood, and yes it’s called Ghost Town. Ghosts are represented by people in varying degrees of pale makeup - and there’s never a bit where someone puts flour on their face to pretend to be one. And apparently they still need to eat, or at least want pizza.

There’s also a werewolf, among other things.

But no vampires, and there’s also never even a joke about garlic keeping vampires away.

Anyway, the werewolf is the most chill and soft-spoken since Oz in Buffy. Which is fun, but makes his involvement in the story feel awkward.

And there are witches, who are portrayed as straight-up villains serving the Devil. Which after relatable ghosts and werewolves, not cool.

There’s a pretty tragic relationship which we find out is pretty tragic from out of nowhere and then ceases to matter.

A public witch freakout (after secrecy throughout) leads to a montage of ghosts running amok and vigilante witch-killing which leads me to suspect budget issues as it feels like a couple of scenes missing from a film that runs under eighty minutes.

And then in the final battle our supernatural heroes are less helpful than a cop with a gun.

It has this first draft kind of feel throughout, missing story beats and jokes I thought were obvious.

Gameability: obviously Buffy, but a largely mundane job with open supernatural makes me think Ghostbusters except here the PCs aren’t involved directly by work.

Streaming free with ads for a month after its first terrestrial showing here on Film4, which amusingly means it was sponsored by a pizza chain.