Review of Slither (2006) by Miranda W — 15 Jun 2009

I was in the mood for a funny ha-ha horror movie that would remind me of the zany no-brainers I used to watch in my late teens/early twenties, and this is exactly what I got. "Slither" occupies the exact geometrical center between "Eight-Legged Freaks", "Top of the Food Chain" and Fred Dekker's "Night of the Creeps", if you've seen any of these. You could also define it as a kind of "Smallville" where the meteor shower, instead of carrying some dreamy teen saviour for the planet, releases a bunch of intrusive interstellar telepathic slugs that use humans as puppets, wombs or meat.

The film stars "Firefly" hero Nathan Fillion, a rather unlucky Michael Rooker (who soon mutates into something out of "From Beyond", except with a little more hair), and Greg Henry as the foul-mouthed Republican mayor. The rest of the cast were new to me, but you get a pretty blonde, a pretty brunette and more than a handful of rednecks.

I've just thought of checking what the USCB had to say about it, and it so happens that they classified it as "O", a category which I was determined to avoid. Oops. I did find the language a problem, but the vulgarity was somehow deactivated by the general good humour of the characters. It felt more like banter than genuinely offensive speech, like all the swear-words my mom affectionately calls my cat with. As for the "irreverence", I spotted it too, but it never felt like the snide references to religion one finds in the more anti-Christian movies: I'm thinking of the "Jesus Saves" sign or the reductio ad absurdum of the sanctity of marriage vows (I'm not sure canon law ever mentions the possibility of your husband turning into a pet-eating tentacled alien inseminator.) The film indeed has a slight "Genesis vs. Darwin" subtext, with schoolteacher Starla teaching her pupils about the meaning of the phrase "survival of the fittest"; and the mayor declaring that if the dominion God gave Adam over creation means anything, it means the opening of the deer-hunting season in Wheelsie (a ludicrous but common misquoting of Genesis, since dominion was given in the context of a totally vegan creation)... just as the aliens themselves open their human-hunting season.

I really had fun watching this film. It has some elements of a zombie movie, within the small town context of the space invasion films of the fifties. There are laugh out loud moments, and I didn't find the gore disturbing at all, given the over-the-top situations. What disappointed me was the rather slow beginning and the failure to make the film more of an ensemble piece in act one, so that Nathan Fillion makes a rather belated entrance as a character with something to do. I also think they missed a very good gag in the final shot (but I may be overestimating my own humour) and I'm afraid that however enjoyable the film was, it didn't leave much of an impression on me afterwards.

I was glad I spotted the "Toxic" movie clip on TV but I missed many other references, mostly in the names of the characters and shops. So pay attention if you're a genre fanatic.