“I am dead. Don’t I look it?”
An inescapable part of James Gunn’s biography is that he got his start at Troma Films, the famed purveyors of over-the-top schlock such as The Toxic Avenger (Gunn’s first big break was as the writer of Tromeo & Juliet). When Slither came out in 2006, Gunn was on the cusp of mainstream success, thanks to his writing work on the pretty solid remake of Dawn of the Dead. He knew he wouldn’t be able to make movies like this forever (he currently helms the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise, because sometimes Hollywood gets things right). In a lot of ways, Slither feels like a paean to his mentor Lloyd Kaufman; in a lot of other ways, it feels wholly original, a film that was meant to spoof and emulate the cult classics of Gunn’s youth, that wound up becoming one in its own right.
Slither is often billed as a horror/comedy, so it’s surprising to see how much the films hews towards horror. It’s somewhat counter-intuitive to cast very funny actors like Nathan Fillion and Elizabeth Banks and have them play things relatively straight, but Gunn is able to thread the needle, and it never feels like the cast is winking at us.
Things begin the same way they would in a B-movie, with a meteor hurtling towards Earth. That’s the last we see of it for a while, but it always stays in the back of our minds. The film follows Starla Grant (Banks), who is in a troubled marriage with Grant Grant (that name is the film’s only real groaner of a joke). Grant is played by Michael Rooker, who is an odd, mannered actor that not a lot of directors know how to use. Gunn is adept at directing Rooker, who plays Grant at his hillbilly grossest, yet never denies him his humanity. After being denied sex, Grant storms off to a karaoke bar, which he leaves with a woman named Brenda Gutierrez (Brenda James), who had a crush on him in their youth. One of the film’s greatest tension-breaking moments is when Grant realizes that Brenda, whose maiden name is Montgomery, has the initials BM. “Your name is BM!” he crows. “Like a piece of shit!”
Grant and Brenda are walking through the woods when they come across the meteor’s inhabitant: a dull yellow slug, about a foot long. It shoots a stinger into Grant’s chest, and as Brenda flees we see that the stinger travels through Gran’ts body and nests in his brain (there’s an unnecessary and kinda lame X-ray graphic to show us all this).
Slither is part creature feature, part alien invasion flick, and part body horror. It’s a loving pastiche, equal parts Kaufman, Carpenter, Romero, Cronenberg, and Gunn himself. There are sly references all around; the high school is named after Fred Ward’s character in Tremors, and the funeral home after Kurt Russell’s character in The Thing. Normally, one would say that Gunn has done his homework, but it doesn’t feel like it was homework for him.
There’s love, and care, and artistry into Rooker’s grotesque transformation; it takes up a good chunk of the film (Slither is a surprisingly slow burn) and makes for a nice showcase of the brilliant makeup and prosthetic work by Gunn’s makeup team. After trying to kill Starla, Grant is on the run. He goes missing for three days, and when next we see him he’s all tentacles, crawling on the ground like a lizard or a scorpion. It’s an unsettling image, and Slither just gets worse. This is a film that wants to disgust you, wants you to watch this with one hand clamped over your mouth. Just look at poor Brenda, swollen to the size of a boulder, kept in a barn by Grant so she can breed thousands of horrible worms.
Slither could get by on disgusting spectacle alone, and sometimes it does, but luckily the performances here are all good-to-great. Fillion could have played Bill like a buffoon, which Fillion excels at, but Bill comes off as a smart guy, also a smartass, who’s decent but not great at his job. Gregg Henry, as Mayor Jack MacReady, is having an absolute blast in what is more or less a comic version of the mayor from Jaws. The difference is, Jack goes on the stakeout and risks his life to stop Grant (he also flips out when he realizes there’s no Mr. Pibb). Tania Saulnier, as the teenage Kylie Strutemeyer, is wonderful. She has the affected worldliness of any teenager, but is smarter, more capable, and more fearless than she seems.
But it’s Banks who is the real revelation here. Although she and Fillion don’t have the best chemistry, she’s such a charming actress that it’s easy to understand why anyone would fall in love with her. She is surprisingly adept at playing a horror heroine, but sacrifices none of the intensity that makes her so damn funny. She doesn’t make an instant transformation into a badass; there’s actual growth and learning in Gunn’s script. Banks gets to be tough, funny, scared, and remorseful, sometimes all in the same scene, but what’s most remarkable about her performance is the deep well of sadness running through it. That’s brought to the foreground in the film’s go-for-broke climax, when Grant is a gargantuan monstrosity that takes up an entire living room. She comforts him, calls him by his name, and swears that they’ll be together, and it’s almost unbearably tender. Slither would be a fun gross-out experiment were it not for Banks’ terrific work.
Slither is the kind of movie that’s very hard to make work – do you want a gross comedy, or an amusing horror film? It skews closer to the latter, and is better for it. I’m happy that Gunn has the GotG franchise, because he’s doing great work with it, but I’d love to see him return to something more personal, like this. He’s really good at it.
10/1: Dawn of the Dead
10/2: Drag Me to Hell
10/3: Pet Sematary
10/4: The Descent
10/5: Repo! The Genetic Opera
10/6: Desierto
10/7: The Blair Witch Project
10/8: Blair Witch
10/9: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
10/10: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
10/11: Prince of Darkness
10/12: 30 Days of Night
10/13: Friday the 13th (2009)
10/14: Slither
10/15: Tremors
10/16: Pandorum
10/17: It Follows
10/18: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
10/19: Poltergeist
10/20: Paranormal Activity
10/21: Creepshow
10/22: VHS
10/23: Nosferatu the Vampyre
10/24: An American Werewolf in London
10/25: The Witch
10/26: The Rocky Horror Picture Show
10/27: Cronos
10/28: The Hills Have Eyes
10/29: The Hills Have Eyes (2006)
10/30: Tucker and Dale vs. Evil
10/31: Halloween (2007)
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