A good chunk of my childhood was spent unsupervised and on a bicycle. My friends and I had free reign over our town, and used this valuable independence to explore the many nooks and crannies of our environment. Overgrown wooded trails that hid strange artifacts dumped in the river, inviting culverts in the park that housed unknown creatures big and small, and the dark recesses of railroad bridge underbellies were the proud territories of our vast domain.
In the summer we were cooled by the library, basement Dungeons & Dragons sessions, mall arcades, and trips to the comic book shop. In winter, these same destinations kept us warm between violent and dangerous sledding excursions and taking the long way home from school.
This daring lifestyle naturally demanded increasingly treacherous situations to navigate, and were often augmented by vivid daydreams of external invasions by hostile threats. Whether it be criminal gangs of ninjas, Nazis hunting occult relics, or a horrifying alien menace, it would be up me and my rag-tag group of pre-teen adventurers to save the town and possibly the planet – and we were more than up for the task.
This readiness for action was born from one highly influential source: ‘80s movies, and lots of them. This is where Inuit director Nyla Innuksuk’s endlessly charming debut feature Slash/Back comes into the picture.
Picking up where “kids on bikes” movies like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and The Goonies leave off (along with effects-driven Lovecraftian sci-fi/horror blood-fests like John Carpenter’s The Thing), Slash/Back is a page right out of my juvenile fantasies of fearless risk-taking and adult-free accomplishment. It might not be a perfect film, but it is one that overflows with heart and ambition, and in the right hands, heart and ambition can go a long, long way.
Filmed entirely on location in the Inuit hamlet of Pangnirtung on Baffin Island, Canada, Slash/Back lets us know right off the bat that it isn’t afraid of excessive bloodshed. In fact, the muted gray landscape of northern Canada is the perfect place to have blood sprayed all over it, and for her extremely likable cast of young local actors to bob and weave their way around while fending off a planetary invasion using traditional Inuit hunting tools and a few well-placed bullets.
To this end, Slash/Back not only offers a fun and nostalgia-fuelled spin on a beloved subgenre (one of the characters openly talks about her love for John Carpenter’s aforementioned subzero alien movie), but also an intimate look at daily life in a community that rarely enjoys positive cinematic representation, if any representation at all. This alone makes Slash/Back worth a look, but in case you need a little more, it also has otherworldly blood-sucking monstrosities to enjoy.
While it’s true that, at times, it’s clear Innuksuk is working under a number of budgetary constraints, she never allows her funding issues to overwhelm the quality of her movie. This is exemplified in the clever ways in which she hides visual effects shortcomings by having us view her creatures through shaky rifle scopes or a pair of binoculars, and by having her “infected” human population dawn eerie sagging masks that distort them into obscene scarecrows who lurch around town in search of prey.
By cinematically centralizing the famous Lovecraft quote “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown” into her presentation, Innuksuk turns a potential visual weakness into grotesque and blasphemous strength simply by not allowing us to ever fully see (or at least see for very long) her alien antagonists. This old-as-the-hills horror technique allows our minds to fill in the blanks, and Innuksuk uses it to near-perfection. Imagine what a talent like this could do with a proper budget.
James is a writer, record collector, wrestling nerd, and tabletop gamer living with his family in Asheville, North Carolina. He is a member of the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the North Carolina Film Critics Association, and contributes to The Daily Orca, Razorcake Magazine, Mountain Xpress, and Asheville Movies.