Chloe Okuno, “Slut” (2014)
Set in the 1970s, this cheesy morality tale is a meeting of Little Red Riding Hood and Southern US small-town Gothica in the style of famous horror films of that period, such “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “Carrie”. Heck, there isn’t much in “Slut” that Stephen King would not recognise, from the teenage female main character who is rejected by the cool kids at high school to the narrow-minded and bigoted atmosphere in the town where she lives, to Granny who spends all her days watching cartoons on television, the lone drifter who rolls into town and the spate of serial murders of teenage girls that begins shortly after.
Molly McIntyre plays Maddy, the teenage girl who lives in a ramshackle house with her grandmother (Sally Kirkland) in a rural town and who is ill at ease with the sexually aware girls in her form at high school. The kids laugh at her for her bespectacled look and her dowdy long dresses. One day a stranger (James Gallo) turns up at the shopping mall ice-skating rink and, after observing her and one other lass, a blonde called Jolee (Kasia Pilewicz), tells Maddy that she’s a lot more interesting than the girls who only care about flaunting their bodies and sexuality to attract dates. After some time though, and having caught sight of that stranger one evening going off with Jolee, Maddy determines she’ll try to dress the same way and goes off home to cut the legs off her jeans and put on some diaphanous blouses with the bottoms tied at the waist. Dressed in such provocative clothing, Maddy starts hanging out at various places where the high school boys congregate in the evenings. In the meantime, the stranger tortures Jolee and kills her in a horrifically excruciating way.
The stranger discovers what Maddy has been up to and decides to teach her a lesson by breaking into her home at night and attempting rape and torture. At this point the film becomes violent and grisly, and the cinematography can be dark and murky. In contrast with its slower first half, in which Maddy’s character is delineated, and her surroundings to be quite impoverished culturally, the film’s action from here on is very fast and surprising as Maddy finds deep inner resources in herself as she fights the stranger.
The character stereotypes are so obvious as to be hackneyed and ripe for parody. The story’s setting pays homage to the old 1970s horror films that must have held director Okuno and her friends spellbound as kids. The film’s themes of awakening teenage sexuality and the danger this can put young innocent individuals like Maddy into, the small-minded nature of rural towns and teenagers’ yearning for purpose in their lives that will take them away from the bigotry and alienation of these their home towns may be familiar to fans of such movies but they take on additional resonance in Maddy’s actions against the stranger. Maddy discovers she is much more than just a kid who can transform from dowdy to alluring with a change of clothes; she realises she can be her own woman after all. The irony is that the one fellow who showed her her true potential happened to be a serial rapist and killer.
McIntyre does a great job playing Maddy in all her character transformations while the other actors have too little screen time to do other than just reinforce their character stereotypes. Gallo at least manages to appear charming and supportive, and dangerously deranged at the same time, and the film gives him a motive to change his mind about Maddy and see her as a slut.
While the film’s pace is a bit uneven and maybe its earlier half could be tightened a little more, it has such fun playing with audience’s expectations of what may happen to Maddy and with the various devices and motifs typical of 1970s teenage horror flicks, that it turns out to be very enjoyable to watch. One can scarcely believe that it is the work of a student film director.