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RENAISSANCE MAN
By Antony Teofilo
March 30, 2005
When James Gunn made his first movie, zombies disemboweled his brother. The shocking attack was filmed on eight-millimeter stock when he was all of twelve years old. Young James went on to become a prodigious screenwriter of scary movies. His brother went on to star in the O.C. Hard to tell which path was more horrific.
Darkness, death, monsters, and humor follow the bloody arc splattered across the stucco basement walls of Gunn's career. SLITHER looks to be Gunn's doctoral thesis in a horror world curriculum that started in his family room, moved through Columbia University and a part time job at Troma films (where he wrote cult hit TROMEO AND JULIET), through to screenwriting credits like his re-write of DAWN OF THE DEAD, and yes, the SCOOBY DOO live action features. SLITHER is his first foray as a director. Real love for the genre is expressed throughout, as well as a surprising attempt to tell a story beneath the disembowelments, beheadings, necrocannibalistic feasting, and the plethora of plump little carnivorous sperm slugs who give the movie its title.
Unlike SHAUN OF THE DEAD, one of SLITHER's best features is that it doesn't leave the explanation for the appearance of zombies and other crawlies purposely vague. The audience is let in on the secret of the force behind the gory consumption of the townspeople of Wheelsy, and without giving too much away, it's sort of neato that the creeps and beasties are not necessarily driven exclusively by their hunger for flesh, or an innate sense of evil. In truth it's a more powerful trigger that drives them: loneliness. That's the sort of creative touch that Gunn brings to this labor of love, a movie definitely designed to appeal to fans of the horror genre. There's also enough black humor tarred on top of the gory-goings-on to keep a dragged-along date chuckling through the proceedings.
Nathan Fillion (who you might have seen as Captain Malcolm Reynolds in canceled-too-soon television show FIRELY, and its really-good-final-episode-released-in-feature-film-format SERENITY) plays the hero du jour here, in the guise of Sheriff Of The Town. Fillion's dry humor is here again, and while many of the flick's laughs come from the kind of horrible deaths one might expect from a zombie splatter film, it's the Sheriff who's got most of the better one liners.
Wheelsy itself is a character as well, the sort of hodgepodge fictional hickburg one might expect in a movie like this, with plenty of goofy, over-wrought takes on what it's like to live in rural America. Wheelsy teems with a population that, at least in part, you're willing to watch get pulled apart because, well...they're hicks. Gunn gives us plenty of people we want to see get slashed and slurped. Chief among them is Michael Rooker, who ViewAskew fans will remember as Mr. Svenning, Brandy's dad, in MALLRATS. Rooker puts on the skin of Grant Grant, the local mucky muck who's got tons of money, no taste, and a trophy wife (40 YEAR OLD VIRGIN's Elizabeth Banks). Unlike most of the monster fodder who lives in Wheelsy, Grant gets to stick around in a pretty hilarious ghoulish form. He transforms into the lead baddie, a creature that's an overt homage to The Blob, and The Thing, combining each of the classic creatures' strengths.
And that's very much indicative of the horror genre' these days: many young writers and directors either pay heavy homage to, or simply remake outright, the classic horror films of the '70's and '80's that they grew up watching. SLITHER does a pretty good job of keeping its own battered head on straight, serving up laughs on a bloody platter. As a viewer, I look forward to a jumpstart in the horror genre, though...some new sort of eerie I haven't seen yet. With remakes like THE HILLS HAVE EYES telling the studios the viewing public doesn't care about new content, it's hard to imagine that even if there was a trump to a movie classic like THE EXORCIST or TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE that wasn't a blatant rip-off or remake, it wouldn't get made because it wasn't guaranteed to make money. I wish I could blame the studios but I can't. The viewing public is bored, and they're going to see remakes with the same sort of rote motor reflex response that the zombies themselves exhibit. For my twelve bucks, I'd like to see something brand spankin' new. But that's just me. The only real complaint I had where SLITHER was concerned was that Gunn substituted a fat guy's naked butt for the requisite booby shot that's supposed to be included in a movie like this. But we'll give him a pass, if not points, for challenging convention on that tip.
While I wouldn't call SLITHER a future cult masterpiece, I do know I belly laughed a few times more than I would have expected to, enough to be worth the price of admission. Gunn really put his blood and guts into this flick. The inventive gore, a sneaky strong storyline, killer kiddies, creepy creatures and garish ghoulies make SLITHER a screamy spectacle of slimy salaciousness worth watching during the pre-summer movie blahs.
SLITHER slimes its way into theaters this Friday, March 31st, 2006.
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