Post by GL on Dec 18, 2006 13:53:13 GMT -5
“Slither” is a rather pleasant addition to the recent horror-comedy genre.
**SPOILERS**
A meteorite crash-lands into the small town of Weesly, and local Grant Grant, (Michael Rooker) comes into contact with it. When his wife Starla, (Elizabeth Banks) begins to notice his strange behavior afterwards, her friend Bill Pardy, (Nathan Fillion) the town’s sheriff, begins to investigate and finds that Grant has started to change into a vicious blob, and is turning the town into zombies with slugs that he can impregnate into the victims. With a small band of survivors from previous attacks, including the Mayor Jack MacReady, (Gregg Henry) and Kylie Strutemeyer, (Tania Saulmier) Bill and Starla fight back against the creature before killing off the whole town.
The Good News: This is one of the better horror comedies to come out recently among the many high profile entries made. This one manages to get the mixture right pretty close to what’s necessary for the two different elements together. The gore in here isn’t over-the-top but in a nice change, the idea of what’s going on is what makes it seem like a gorefest. The one scene which best emphasizes this is the one in a barn. When a hunting group discovers a barn in the countryside, they cautiously go inside and they see a victim who’s just a ball of enormously stretched flesh with a small head in the middle of it. After several minutes talking, they realize that the size of the ball keeps getting bigger. The skin on the taught body then begins to split open and the body then explodes in a gruesome mess with all sorts of huge worms then being all over the floor. They end up in several people’s mouths while others cover their mouths to prevent that from happening to them with several of them buried in a pile of worms that then quickly leave. Given what happened, the only gore in the scene is a brief shot of the skin stretching, and it’s just a brief glimpse. Otherwise, it’s a pretty gore-less scene, and considering what happened, that’s a nicely refreshing thing to see. When it does decide to go for the gore, such as when a tentacle whips out strikes a man, we then see a slightly bloody line down his face and neck, with his entire body then splitting apart with his intestines and other organs spilling out in a bloody mess, or all the gunshots to kill the creatures are done, it’s appropriately gory. A blown-up head looks quite brutal and gory, and is thankfully done in real make-up rather than CGI, giving them more realism and practicality. The monstrous blob in here is very well-designed, but wouldn’t come anywhere close to being as memorable had it been a CGI creature. It has to be live-action for it to give it that feel. There is also a pretty healthy supply of suspense thrown in, with the bathtub sequence a prime example. As one character bathes wearing earphones, various large worms are seen crawling up the house and into the bathroom. One then slithers up the tub and then into it where it then swims toward them on the surface of the water between the legs. At the last moment they see it and scream, while it heads toward their mouth and partially gets inside it. As they struggle to pull it out, there is a long sequence where it continually tries to get inside, and it plays havoc on the viewer. They eventually pull it out and then uses a hot curling iron to fry the worm, but it’s a masterpiece of suspense played successfully. The later sequence where the infected zombies trap a character inside a truck and pound on it to get inside is pretty creepy, and the cabin sequence holds some tense moments as well. It’s also painfully funny, as the dialog contains some real winners that come out of nowhere and score the laugh. The mayor gets the majority of them, but the rest of the cast get some good ones in as well. The spirit of the film is a nice indicator, since everything here really isn’t meant to be taken as really scary and instead is a real loving send-up and can be viewed in those terms. There really wasn’t a lot in here that wasn’t likable.
The Bad News: There some problems here that still shine through. The movie spends too much time with jokes and cheesy dialog and misses a lot of opportunities to create some great action scenes. It’s very lacking in the gun play department. In a movie where the entire sheriff’s department and a few civilians are trying to take down zombies who’ve been taken over and spit out acid goo at people, you would think that there would be a lot of gun play, with exploding heads, gun-shot wounds and more, but it really skimps on any real big gun play scenes, which hurts when you consider how dangerous of an enemy they’re dealing with. The pacing is also a little off, which is expected because of the earlier problem. The opening is pretty slow going, setting up the later parts of the film, but since it’s spelled out early on where everything’s going, it’s just bidding time until it gets to the good stuff. Granted, when it happens, it’s great, but there’s a long wait to get there. All the marital drama is a prime example, playing out too long to be of use other than as time padding, and the recurrence of it gets irritating. These, though, would be all fine if only the film wasn’t so homage and spoof-heavy as it is. There’s a whole collection of scenes that are tips-of-the-hat to so many different films that it at times doesn’t seem like an original film. This is it’s main problem, but there are others at work here.
The Final Verdict: With a lot to enjoy about it and very few discouraging remarks, this is a really entertaining film that rarely miss-fires. As the main thing about it is that it’s mostly personal attitude toward some of the topics and themes in it, this can be recommended to all and still find it a lot of fun.
Rated R: Graphic Violence, Graphic Language and scenes of animal slaughter and the aftermath