| SLITHER |
 2006 - USADirector: James Gunn
- Reviewed by Eric
It all starts, of course, with a mysterious meteor landing in a small town in the middle of nowhere. Something squishy and alien emerges from it and infects some poor fool who stumbles upon it in the middle of the night. This fool is Grant Grant (Michael Rooker), husband of the local hottie schoolteacher Starla Grant (Elizabeth Banks). Starla thinks her husband is having an allergic reaction when his face and body begin to break out in bumps and rashes. She draws the line when a pair of hideous tentacles emerge from his chest and try to impregnate her with alien babies. Meanwhile, of course, there is Bill Pardy (Nathan Fillion), the local sheriff who has carried a torch for Starla since high school and becomes the leader of the official search for whatever has been killing and munching on all the local pets and farm animals. With Grant/slug-monster on the loose, it isn’t long before... well, let me just say that there are tiny killer slugs involved, which crawl into your mouth and turn you into a zombie. Of course. If this somehow does not sound like the most awesome movie in the universe to you, let me say again that the movie knows every time you’re going to roll your eyes and say, "Of course," and by being so funny it makes it a pleasure to watch Slither jump through all the hoops of genre convention you would normally dread. And yet, like Scream, it’s not really a farce, because it also works surprisingly well as a horror flick. It’s not that the characters are stupid or self-aware, as in the Scary Movie series—it’s more that, well, they live in a B-movie gore-fest. Would you act any differently if you were in their B-movie gore-fest shoes? This is a movie that knows how to be funny. Sometimes all it takes is a little understatement, such as one point late in the film when Bill can only remark, "That is some fucked up shit right there." (You’ll see.) Sometimes it’s because of the pure intentions of the characters, such as when Starla gives a heartfelt speech to Grant/slug-monster about the sanctity of their marriage ("We vowed to love each other, for better or for worse..."). And during a nighttime stake out waiting to try and capture Grant/slug-monster, one officer’s response to an inquiry about why he’s never tried to sleep with the female officer made me laugh so hard I almost spit out my water. Not that eating or drinking is anything you will ever want to do again after you see what happens next in that scene. Ewwwwww. I’m not usually one to be entertained by something just because it grosses me out, but Slither truly deserves recognition for containing some of the nastiest, ickiest, goriest, yuckiest, most disgusting horror scenes I’ve ever witnessed. I mean, the sheer extremity of them is part of the comedy, which is probably why I found them so entertaining—there’s nothing entertaining about horror imagery that exists for its own sake. There’s got to be a reason for it. Comedy is a very good reason. And because of it, Slither kept my attention so well it took me a while to realize it was also kind of scaring the hell out of me. Slither is the movie I didn’t know I needed in my life. I recommend it to you as someone who doesn’t give most horror movies the time of day. But when a movie is so confident about what it’s trying to do, and accomplishes it so skillfully, well, there’s nothing wrong with that. In a year in which horror film embarrassments such as The Hills Have Eyes and When a Stranger Calls are making back their entire budgets in the first few days of release, it’s kind of gross that Slither earned a paltry $3.9 million on its opening weekend. Grosser than anything you’ll see a killer slug doing to a human being in Slither. |
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Slither is a movie that most people will look at and think, "That movie looks stupid," when in fact not being stupid is what sets it apart from other horror dreck you’ll typically find in theaters. Or rather, it’s really clever about being stupid. It’s ridiculous, but it knows it, and knows exactly how to walk the line between horror and comedy. And it succeeds wildly at both. Now there is a rare and wonderful thing.
