While white people steadily line up to fork a few bucks for the race-baiting Avatar: The Way of Water, a true Indigenous sci-fi flick came out a few months ago: the alien-infused, back-biting cut of Slash/Back, directed by the daring Nyla Innuksuk.
A community of wholesome-but-troublesome pre-teens are petering around their small Intuit town. Taking their father’s boat to a neighboring island, they have to fend off a snarling bear. But the animal is seemingly part of a cosmic invasion, beginning with small, cuddly scenes of true wildlife to extraterrestrial-possessed, snarling-spittle man-things.
After said bear is taken out by the girls, the aliens want revenge. Now inhibited the town’s small police force, they come after the girls — and these are no shrieking violets! They formulate a master plan: armed with a hunting rifle, harpoon and other tools of the trade, to take out the menace with extreme prejudice, all in time for the conclusion of the town’s community center dance.
A Native-twinged riff on malingering post-mortem possession along the lines on John Carpenter’s The Thing and other stalwarts, Slash/Back takes the changeling formula and breathes new life with the Innuksuk’s innovative story, set in a dying town where tradition lumbers forth and swings back with a sick crack — with, of course, an alien invasion theme.
Slash/Back’s leads — especially Tasiana Shirley and Nalajoss Ellsworth as two of the young warriors — are up to the task, quelling any incoming invasion with both their Indigenous heritage and their pop-culture breakdown, giving this movie another rung of the absolute ladder of total domination … with space monsters to boot. —Louis Fowler