Slither (2006)
Directed by James Gunn
A small town is taken over by an alien plague, turning residents into zombies and all forms of mutant monsters.
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Paying tribute to his Lloyd Kaufman roots with a shot in which The Toxic Avenger is on TV in the background, James Gunn's Slither is more in line with the hipster revisionism of his screenplay for Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead .
His screenplay is both a tribute to and a send-up of the gruesome 1980s Troma Pictures shockers he loves -- there's even a clip from the company's best-known film, "The Toxic Avenger" -- and his cast plays even the most ridiculous scenes with admirably straight faces, which makes the material that much funnier.
After homegrown talents like Sam Raimi, Stuart Gordon and Lloyd Kaufman (co-founder of Troma Entertainment) reinvigorated the genre in the '80s with Evil Dead II, Re-Animator and The Toxic Avenger respectively, audiences have generally had to look overseas for movies that brought both the funny and the scary.
Before breaking through in the horror realm as the screenwriter of 2004’s excellent Dawn of the Dead remake, James Gunn spent years toiling for Troma Entertainment, the New York company famous for campy, no-budget shockers like The Toxic Avenger and Class of Nuke ‘Em High .
Writer/director James Gunn cut his teeth with the Troma Studios filmmaking crew (“The Toxic Avenger,” “Tromeo & Juliet”), so naturally the camp factor in “Slither” is high.
However, Gunn — who even includes a clip from The Toxic Avenger — has crafted a much savvier, more professional film than anything his Troma compatriots ever managed.
The film is disgusting and, in its way, it's sad, too--and it's that element of the pathetic that reminded me the most of the tightrope described by Ron Underwood's cult classic Tremors.
The faint of heart should skip it, but if your guilty-pleasure tastes run to such storied horror-comedies as ''Re-Animator" and ''Tremors," here's your cup of extraterrestrial gastropod guts.
Slither calls to mind Tremors , Twin Peaks and Lake Placid as much as Night of the Living Dead .
Putting it into context, it's not as enjoyable as either Tremors (which resides on the pinnacle) or Shaun of the Dead, and is about on par with Eight Legged Freaks.
Anyone can make a bad horror comedy, but Gunn, the screenwriter of the vastly underrated remake of George A. Romero’s seminal gutbuster-cum-social critique Dawn of the Dead, is not only an honest and heartfelt fan of horror films but also one heck of a writer: Gag all you need to while taking in this smart, ghastly, and often disarmingly hilarious homage to everything from Romero’s herky-jerky undead to Stuart Gordon’s moister moments in Re-Animator and From Beyond (not to mention Brian Yuzna’s adroit skewering of Republican family values in the little-seen 1989 nightmare-cum-satire Society), but by the time the final credits roll, damned if you’re not downright upbeat about the whole alien invasion situation on screen.
An affectionate homage to gooey, off-kilter horror movies (see: all things Troma, David Cronenberg's Shivers, Fred Dekker, The Blob, and so much more), this movie has one unexpected thing: A heart.
Gunn's goofy tale mashes together such classics as "The Night of the Living Dead" with "I Married a Monster from Outer Space," "The Blob" and David Cronenberg's "Shivers."
The closest it comes is a scene where a parasitic slug invades a bathtub — and that’s a riff on a well-known scene from David Cronenberg’s Shivers (aka They Came from Within).
But Gunn doesn't simply draw from "Invaders From Mars," David Cronenberg's "Shivers," "Alien," the George Romero zombie flicks, or the tawdry Troma horror movies just to demonstrate that he's seen the same horror pictures that we have (as the makers of the "Scary Movie" franchise do).
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With additional nods to directors like David Cronenberg (a local shop is named after "Videodrome" antihero Max Renn) and Frank Henenlotter ("Basket Case"), "Slither" is a movie only true horror buffs can love.
The rape establishes, however, a certain lawlessness in Slither alongside a real interest in grotesque-ifying the American gothic in a new "household" that Grant (starting to look a lot like Belial from Frank Henenlotter's Basket Case--indeed, a bar in the film is called "Henenlotter's") sets up in an abandoned barn, bringing home the bacon, as it were, and spreading his seed in one explosive, crimson guignol of a sentient-slug ejaculation.
Grant turns into tentacled monstrosity (bearing a not coincidental facial resemblance to Belial from Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case— since the bar in the film is named Henenlotter’s) who then “impregnates” Brenda with a horde of nasty slugs bent on taking over mankind.
The town's beer joint is named Henenlotter's in honor of the director of the grindhouse classic ''Basket Case" (1982), while David Cronenberg's 1975 ''They Came From Within" gets a viscous shout-out.
Gunn does have the sense to create several scenes of notable tension, but little that aims for a creepy horror-film frisson in the manner of Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator, Ken Russell’s The Lair of the White Worm or Don Mancini’s Seed of Chucky.
The faint of heart should skip it, but if your guilty-pleasure tastes run to such storied horror-comedies as ''Re-Animator" and ''Tremors," here's your cup of extraterrestrial gastropod guts.
He's got a gift for combining throwaway gags with the kind of gloppy gore that reached its pinnacle in John Carpenter's 1982 remake of "The Thing."
That’s not to say that every film like Slither steals away multiple megabucks from their time at the Cineplex (Shaun of the Dead and John Carpenter’s The Thing were both less than boffo upon initial release), but when nothing else out there comes close to this movie’s invention and charm, ignoring it seems downright dumb.
With additional nods to directors like David Cronenberg (a local shop is named after "Videodrome" antihero Max Renn) and Frank Henenlotter ("Basket Case"), "Slither" is a movie only true horror buffs can love.
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No relation to the wacky 1973 James Caan-Peter Boyle-Sally Kellerman laugher of the same title, "Slither" is an uproarious hybrid horror-comedy about a small town visited by a rapidly evolving, unearthly organism that gives new meaning to the phrase "divide and conquer."
In New Zealand, a pre-Lord of the Rings Peter Jackson churned out wonderfully demented splatterfests like Bad Taste and Dead Alive, Hong Kong had the Chinese Ghost Story cycle, and just two years ago our friends across the pond shared with us the genius that is Shaun of the Dead.
The fact is, for anyone looking for logical links between past and present efforts, films like Night of the Creeps, Robot Holocaust and Bad Taste provide far more credible creative starting points.