If you love the kind of horror movies that make you say, “Oh, sick!” a few seconds before you laugh your ass off, you need to see Slither.
Slither is one of the those rare movies that mixes full-contact in-your-face nastiness with some seriously funny stuff.
Nathan Fillion (Firefly, Serenity, Saving Private Ryan) plays a small town police chief struggling to stem an impending invasion of parasitic alien slugs.
It starts out with a meteor falling in the woods, and a local businessman, played by Michael Rooker (an immediately recognizable character actor from dozens of films and TV shows), discovers the meteor. He is promptly possessed by the alien worm dwelling inside. The worm eats into his brain, takes him over, and he begins to “nest” in various icky ways, including eating vast quantities of meat, living and dead, and impregnating a local woman with his spiked tentacles of doom to bear his alien offspring. He also begins to mutate, turning into a disgusting, squidlike tentacled entity.
The impregnated woman grows to e-nor-mous proportions, and she finally splits open and spills her vast number of slug-like babies out into the world, where they scatter in all directions. The slugs, in turn, attack other human hosts and turn them into flesh-eating zombies that do the bidding of the original creature.
This movie has it all. Meteors, parasitic alien monsters, gross slithering things, blood and guts, acid-spitting flesh-eating zombies, drunken redneck dysfunction, cute yet disturbing zombie kids, and a great cast.
Nathan Fillion brings his well-practiced tongue-in-cheek aplomb from Firefly and Serenity to deliver some hilarious lines. Among the best is, as he watches the former-townpeople-turned-flesh-eating-zombies merging into this large blob-like mass of the host organism, “Well, now. That is some fucked up shit.” Gregg Henry, another well-known character actor, plays the town’s foul-mouthed mayor, and he almost keeps up with the snappy one-liners.
This movie reminded me of many others, good and bad. Night of the Creeps, The Blob, Creepshow, Dawn of the Dead, The Thing, and Bubba Hotep, just to name a few. If only all horror movies could be as smart as this one.
With a great cast and dialogue that rivals the wry, rapid-fire wit of Joss Whedon, Slither makes you squirm and giggle at the same time, and that’s a winner.