Alex Moss EditorBefore he was marshalling The Guardians of The Galaxy and long before he got Superman and DC airborne again James Gunn was making offbeat, quirky genre films. Slither was his feature film debut and while there are clearly seeds of his latter work here this is a beast of a different nature and it’s all the more stupidly enjoyable as result of it.
The plot is a simple story of a small-town America invaded by a parasitic alien. When his wife Starla (Elizabeth Banks) ignores his advances Grant (Michael Rooker) heads out into the woods with another woman only to be ‘stung’ by something not of this earth. As he begins to crave meat he starts to morph into something, well, gross. As local pets start to go missing Chief Bill (Nathan Fillion) leads a posse of locals to track down Grant but soon discover he’s got an army of mind-controlling slugs at his disposal.
If that plot sounds a little “WTF” that is very much the point of Slither. It is a film very much in the vein of throwback comedy horrors like Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste. For every bit of gross-out bodily fluid spilled, puked, spat or spilled there is an equally dry bit of dialogue to offset it. Like all his films, Slither is James Gunn having fun. There aren’t levels of deep themes on offer, this is the kind of film that back in the day you’d be browsing the shelves at your local video rental store and would stumble upon a little, relatively unknown gem, like Slither. It’s telling that this release from Vertigo is leaning into that with its hand-drawn cover art.
In the lead role you are reminded what a fumble Hollywood made by not allowing Nathan Fillion to be a bona fide leading man. He should have been Nathan Drake in an adaptation of Uncharted, he should have been Hal Jordan in Green Lantern. Instead his peak cinematic outings were the film version of cancelled TV show Firefly, Serenity, and this. Since then his wonderfully snarky delivery has been relegated on the big screen to mostly cameos in Gunn films. Banks is solid in the scream queen like role, clearly having a riot at everything going on around her while Rooker is utterly disgusting as Grant and shows why he is often Gunn’s go-to actor to play rich characters who you are never quite sure whether to boo or cheer for.
Gunn wears his influences firmly on his sleeve, Slither is part The Thing, part Invasion Of The Body Snatchers with a dash of films like Critters and Tremors thrown in for good measure. And it works, resoundingly so. Slither is never anything less than stupid, funny, over the top fun.
Slither is available on 4K Digital, Special Edition Steelbook and Blu-ray and can be ordered through HMV, ZAVVI & Amazon
