FILM REVIEW – SLITHER
Well produced horror movie parody / tribute to the early David Cronenberg gore-fests such as Shivers & Rabid, and lots of other B-Movie gems from Them to Tremors.
In Slither, a parasitic monster arrives in the US by meteorite. It quickly infects a local (already repulsive) womaniser by putting a giant slug like entity into his chest. His lover is scared, but eventually relieved when he seems to be all right, but of course, he is far from all right.
The poor chap goes quickly from eating raw uncooked refrigerated meat by the ton to eating all the local cats and dogs, and livestock to starting on babies. His wife, played by Elizabeth Banks notices that he is ill, and facially disfigured which he attributes to a bee-sting. He claims to be seeing the doctor, but she finds out that he is lying. Meanwhile, he goes for more sex with his girlfriend, and contaminates her with the virus too, both in direct transfer of slug monster tendrils, and by impregnating her with its offspring. She now also needs to feed on people, and local pets, so the sheer volume of missing animals and citizens soon attracts police attention.
The cops realize that is implicated in the case and arrive at his wife’s house just as he is trying to rape and infect her. He is now mutating into a squid like entity. The cops chase him off, but soon face the extent of his metamorphosis. They find the girlfriend, who is now a bloated queen insect filled with the monster’s thousands of slug babies. She explodes into birth and the slugs take over most of the cops, turning out an army of zombies that take over the town. A young woman has a narrow escape from a slug in the bath, and sees them take possession of her entire family. She alone escapes. With the wife of the original infectee, and the lead-cop, played by Nathan Fillion, who was in Buffy - The Vampire Slayer, (TV) Firefly (TV) and the film Serenity, she leads the resistance by the increasingly desperate survivors as the entire town is wiped out.
Eventually, the wife is captured by the monster, which is now developing into a single giant entity, with all of the zombies speaking in his voice and able to communicate to the central brain what it sees and hears. The creature makes a big ceremonial deal out of preparing his wife for their new sexual congress, as more and more people are absorbed into his central blobbing mass. He seems to genuinely crave her love and her forgiveness which actually makes you care about him for once. She seems willing to accept her fate, but she has a dagger in her panties which she soon wields, though it fails to kill him. The cop is also captured, after a laughable slapstick failure to use a conveniently found stray hand grenade on the monster and as he is drawn to his apparent doom, he manages to make the monster swallow a gas bottle and then detonates it. He and the two women survive as all the monsters seem to die with the main host entity. The rather weak looking final explosion is possibly the only shallow special effect here. The monster make-up, prosthetics and other special effects are well handled. The scale of the menace leaves you wondering if the creature can be stopped. It is defeated, but a fun post credit sequence shows a cat foolishly licking the jelly like remains of part of the monster. We see a tiny tendril reaching out to the cat and hear a distinctive yelp as it makes contact.
The film mixes stark, relentless graphic horror with excellent tongue in twist humour. Seeing the octopus like creature that is the original infected man, one cop mumbles, “He looks like something that fell off my dick during the war.” I think Cronenberg will like the tribute made here.
LINK http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0439815/
Arthur Chappell
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