Caradise Best of 2023 – Car Culture Movie Festival: “Slasher” by John Landis
Best of the Caradise 2023
Welcome to our 2023 Car Culture Movie Festival! This Month, we will bring back some of the movies that have impacted Car Culture or reveal something about it behind the scenes.
Back in 2004, John Landis, of Thriller fame, spent a whole week at a Toyota Car Dealer in Memphis Tennessee, and followed a very special fellow entrusted with selling dozens of car in a single weekend. This movie is a true time capsule, and an amazing view of what it took to sell cars 20 years ago will certainly bring memories of old marketing campaigns local dealerships did (and some still do!).
“Slasher” is a documentary film that follows the experiences of Michael Bennett, a used car salesman from California, as he travels to Memphis, Tennessee for a week to help a car dealership. The film captures Bennett’s interactions with various people he meets during his time there, including locals, fellow car salesmen, strippers, and Elvis Presley impersonators.
Michael Bennett starts the movie saying “As a Car Salesman, I have to understand people will think whatever I say is a lie” – Is a very self-aware and interesting starting point.
Bennett is the ‘Slasher’: A man that can sell a large number of cars over the weekend, given a week to 10 days to prep. The dealership is having a lousy summer moving old car inventory and the General Manager has no choice to call in the ‘Slasher’, even when the dealership’s own sales staff is fuming mad. Below the making-of video gives you a quick summary of the movie, but I recommend you watch the whole thing
The movie is also masterclass in proper consumer marketing, clever segmentation and a true attention to the objective. Seeing Bennett over the course of a week prep the sales team, create a subtle system for knowing what the customer can actually afford, hire the ‘Slashettes’ a critical component of the sale, run an aggressive radio and flyer campaign, and how to handle the actual sales process and the timing for the actual prizes. There is absolutely a method to the madness.
There are some very crude moments, as well. Bennett himself will need an average of a beer-per-hour each day to continue cranking and that’s just on a regular day. Memphis is perfect as the backdrop of the documentary, the city with the most personal bankruptcies in the US is also a perfect place for this type of ‘Slasher’ sale.
The climax will be the ‘Slasher’ sale that will occur Friday, Saturday and Sunday, where Bennett, playing reverse auctioneer, carnival carney and circus ringmaster will do its absolute best to sell all the used cars he can. There will be balloons! Hot Dogs! Prizes! and a very, very low priced car.
The magic here, is that each day of the sale there will be a $88 car, and while the story bitterly ends with a car breakdown, from one of the mentioned $88 cars, you cannot deny it is magic, and it does the job beautifully.
Through Bennett’s experiences, the film provides a look into the unique culture of used car sales from the distant past, that is really not so distant from the current car market’s tactics. The documentary also explores a bit of Bennett’s personal life, including his relationship with his wife and his struggles with drinking and depression.
All in all an amazing movie. I can recommend this 100%. Very, very hard to find. You can stream it here:
