“What the fuck was that?” Nathan Fillion asked the same question I did while watching Slither. When trying to figure out what to end my creepy crawly coverage with, I was between this and The Nest. Slither is a film many people love and talk highly about, but I had never seen it. James Gunn has mainly been a miss for me, and as someone who can’t stand his superhero films (except you, Peacemaker, I love you), I was hesitant to watch this. From humble beginnings with Troma to being a Hollywood elite, James Gunn has had a career to be envied by freshmen in film schools all across the earth. What’s become clear through Gunn’s work, and most filmmakers when they ‘make it’, is that the craft of filmmaking becomes more about money than the love of the craft. This is not to sound bitter because I live paycheck to sperm donation, but it feels like he’s lost sight of why he got into filmmaking in the first place.
Slither is an odd beast and is the second to last film of Gunn’s I’ve enjoyed. (I’m using the term enjoyed loosely.) While billed as a goopy homage to films like Night of the Creeps, Society, and Shivers, Slither takes the best parts of these films and fills in the holes with incredibly cheesy and [somewhat] enjoyable dialogue. The film starts oddly when we see the town’s mayor making his way through town. We’re made to believe that the downtown area of this small town is crawling with degenerates and unhoused people, but then nothing ever comes of this again. My first written note for Slither is literally, “WTF is this town?” Gunn starts this world-building for the town and immediately forgets he even brought it up. It feels cheap and purposeless.
This film is definitely a horror comedy, but whether or not the comedy works is unquestionably case by case. Most of the humor fell flat for me, leaving my enjoyment of Slither to the practical effects and the story. Now, there are some unfortunate digital ‘enhancements’ that make some of the shots of the creature look pretty laughable (and not in the way he intended). The practicals we DO get are brutally fantastic. One would expect an homage of 80s horror comedies to be strictly practical. But maybe that’s just me.
Gunn’s cast does a lot of the film’s heavy lifting and finds ways to make his sloppily written dialogue palatable. “Should you be asking this many questions close to your birthday?” Even Michael Rooker has difficulty making that line sound good. Slither hinges on the final reveal of the creature in the third act, and the reveal is worth the wait…even if it feels like less of an homage to Society and more of intellectual property theft. If you want a decently fun creature feature that you can watch on a Friday night with some friends, a 12-pack, and a Domino’s emergency pizza, then Slither would be a good one to throw on the queue.
