Slither
Directed by: James Gunn
Starring: Nathan Fillion, Michael Rooker, Elizabeth Banks
Rated: R for strong horror violence and gore, and language.
Parental Notes: This is definitely an R-rated horror movie; while it does have quite a bit of humor, it also has people exploding, heads being destroyed, and other unpleasantness. This is not a kid flick.
The intentionally funny horror film is not a new genre. The eighties brought us “Ghostbusters” and “Evil Dead II” for example. In the last few years we’ve had “Eight Legged Freaks” and “Shaun of the Dead,” and now we have “Slither,” a self-aware blend of comedy and gore which will have you laughing as frequently as grimacing in disgust. Written and directed by Troma alumn James Gunn (if you haven’t at least heard of Troma, you either won’t like this movie or need to visit troma.com posthaste), it’s at once an homage to and a skewering of all those awful alien invasion horror movies from back in the day.
A meteorite strikes just outside the small town of Wheelsy, and even before a gross slug critter crawls out of it you know it means trouble. This is the sort of town that once had a hopeful future and now waits all year for the drunken party that opens deer-hunting season. The slug from the meteorite possesses the town’s richest citizen, Grant Grant (Michael Rooker, “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer”), and he sets about spreading his web of control, kidnapping a local gal for his nefarious purposes and generally behaving very suspiciously. The townspeople don’t really pay him any mind, although they do post notices for their missing pets, filling the community bulletin boards.
The hero of the film is Police Chief Bill Pardy, played to perfection by Nathan Fillion (last seen in “Serenity”). Fillion has superb comedic timing and deadpan delivery, and he commits to his role enough to carry off lines about what a bad day he’s having. Pardy is the standard sort of hero for this sort of story: he’s a good guy, honorable, and still carrying a torch for the girl he fell in love with back in junior high school. Even better, when attacked by alien slugs, he has the presence of mind to warn his companions “don’t let them get in your mouth!”
The girl Pardy’s pining for is Starla (Elizabeth Banks, “The 40 Year Old Virgin”), and she’s married to Grant. This puts her at the epicenter of the infestation, but she’s thankfully not a screeching damsel in distress. She does a bit of screaming, sure (this is a horror flick, after all), but she’s also determined to help Pardy bring Grant under control and find the missing woman. The female characters here are actually better than we viewers might expect. Cute young thing Kylie (Tania Saulnier, “Found”) has an obligatory bubblebath early on, but once she fights off the slug that attacks her, she proves herself thoroughly capable of rescuing the hero, and not just for comedic effect.
The alien itself is pretty revolting, and there are plenty of nasty special effects, both fancy CGI and old-school prosthetic, by the time we get to the big face off at the end. We are, after all, dealing with a multi-tentacled slug thing and its numerous offspring, which embed themselves into the brains of their victims and turn them into zombies controlled by the original alien mind. There’s plenty of gross-out blood and guts material for those who enjoy that sort of thing.
Humor is an important component of horror films, too — one without it is almost certain to devolve into a pretentious mess worthy of “Mystery Science theater 3000.” But “Slither” cranks the humor way, way up, giving us both parodies of the genre (breathless heroine: “Be careful!” Hero, sarcastically: “Oh, now there’s a thought.”) and a fair bit of general goofiness (one of Pardy’s deputies gets a little squid doll and half-jokingly suggesting they use it to help potential witnesses I.D. the alien).
The ending doesn’t provide quite as much of a big bang as one might like, but the rest of the film is solid enough that I was able to forgive “Slither” for a mediocre last few minutes. Fans of this sort of film likely will be able to as well. This is a great installment in the genre, and it’s to be hoped that the box office take is good enough for Gunn to put out more films of this sort.