There is nothing better, for me anyway than a movie that takes its bizarre or ridiculous plot points completely serious and really sells them. If you can make the tone of the movie as serious as the characters in the movie want it to be, that’s comedy gold. Lemme explain further…
In the town of Kingfisher things are quiet, but they weren’t always that way. The town used to be home to the Halcyon Days Asylum. It was a place where 40,000 people were tortured and killed brutally. The asylum was closed and the bodies were buried in a mass grave in an attempt to literally cover it up. Unfortunately, the spirits of those dead came back and haunted the people of Kingfisher. So the mayor did what any good politician would do, he built a city for the ghosts to inhabit and live away from the actual living people. Everything was fine until a rash of murders at a local Chinese restaurant by “The Werewolf” tore the city apart again, pitting the ghosts against the living. The werewolf was never caught, but his killing spree ended and everyone went back to life as normal as it could be.
Years later a delivery boy for Perfect Pizza is murdered on a ghost’s doorstep and there are whispers the werewolf has returned. Jack just wants his pizza place to survive in the hard economy, and to do that, he must deliver the best “za” that Kingfisher can get. The police want to catch the werewolf and finally close these murder cases gone cold. The mayor just wants to pain pictures of topless ladies. Astrid just wants to avenge the death of her boyfriend. But there is something sinister lurking in the shadows that just wants everything to fall apart.
Slice manages to somehow straddle the line of subtlety and excess without coming off as cheesy or immature. The subject matter here could easily be seen as childish or taken as a joke but the way that the movie handles it and the actors portray it keeps it feeling real. It’s like the actors truly believe and have zero scientific issues with anything happening in the town of Kingfisher. The joke is that it is no joke. Few movies are able to pull this off as well as Slice does. It’s truly what makes this movie a great movie.
I am at odds with myself over how Slice ends, but only because I like it so much. The ending lends itself well to making this a recurring thing and I would love to have more of it, but if what could potentially follow isn’t as good it would tarnish the overall shine that is here. Slice feels like something that could have been made into a very well produced and written episodic offering. It’s easy to see where they might have possibly broken this up into three or four short episodes and then gone on to do more post-credits. I enjoyed everything about Slice and I think that even the passing fan of horror movies would enjoy this one. Currently, it is a 99c rental on iTunes and is free VOD for Amazon Prime members. In my opinion, it is worth every second of your time to watch this one and is the one and only big surprise of this year’s marathon for me.
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