Slither
Written and directed by James Gunn
Much like Feast, this sci-fi horror-comedy is a gore fest that wears its b-movie conventions and references on its sleeve. This type of horror movie seems to be making a comeback, most likely a response from horror filmmakers sick and tired of the overabundance of torture-themed movies that are all the rage right now.
Written and directed by James Gunn. He wrote the script for the successful remake of Dawn of the Dead, one of the better horror remakes ever made. Gunn has an admirable love for horror films—everything from 50’s era camp monster movies to the splatter flicks of the 80’s. Slither is laden with references to past genre films (Tremors, Videodrome, The Thing, and Evil Dead to name a few) so much that it reaches a sort-of Tarantino-esque level of film geek affection.
Gunn works on a small budget ($15.5 million), and most of that budget was spent on decent CGI, puppet and prosthetic effects. While I’m not a particularly big fan of directors using CGI in horror films, Gunn does use the technology to compose some clever and disgusting sequences. Take the scene in which the villain of the film, played by Michael Rooker, impregnates an unfortunate girl. Rooker’s character has been infected with some kind of space slug that landed in his town. After he impregnates said girl via some repulsive tentacles that grow out of his stomach, the girl grows so huge—the result of thousands of growing space slugs in her body—she looks like a barn-sized basketball.
The plot of Slither is simple. A meteorite hits a small town and is discovered by its biggest jerk, who in turn is infected by a slug-like creature that shoots out of the pod. The rest of the town is quickly infected and turn into zombies.
The film’s hero is played by fanboy favorite Nathan Fillion (of Firefly and Serenity fame). Fillion has a b-level Harrison Ford charm. A sort-of Bruce Campbell for this generation. He does what he can with the decent script, particularly in his deadpan delivery of some of the film’s more memorable lines (“Thank you for saving my ass back there. . . Of course, when I tell that story, it's gonna be the other way around.”).
Slither doesn’t pretend to be anything else than an updated version of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead films or Peter Jackson’s hilariously over-the-top Dead Alive, except with much better special effects. What was enjoyable with those films was the pure cheaply made look of the gore and the films themselves. Slither has too much present day cinema gloss covering up the cheap thrills that Gunn was after. Yet fans of those kinds of horror films will be satisfied with Slither, and Gunn was successful in making a different kind of horror film from the mainstream.
HDFEST grading scale
-Slither-
Story B-
Acting C
Visuals C+
Originality B
Enjoyability B
Overall Grade C+
DVD Extras A-
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