Slither
âHomageâ horror movies can turn out to be either really good or really bad, being either a sign of a filmmaker with not one creative bone in his body making a patchwork piece of crap, or something that turns out to be clever, funny, and have at least one original idea in its own right. Thus is the case with this 2006 release written and directed by James Gunn, a guy who learned his art at the knee of the legendary Troma founder Lloyd Kaufman (and even features a Toxic Avenger clip on a TV screen), which starts out early with references to both Carpenterâs Thing and The Blob, and continues onward tossing as much as it can out there while maintaining some likably goofball dialogue exchanges. Nathan (Serenity) Fillion stars as the Police Chief in a small town who still pines for his childhood love played by the gorgeous Elizabeth Banks, but alas, she is now grown and married (not to mention had her college education paid for!) to the townâs resident millionaire (Michael Rooker) which allows her to come up with different euphemisms to tell her older hubby how she has a headache every night in bed. One night Rooker grows tired of her refusals and takes off to the local bar to pick up a local piece of white trash, then itâs off to the woods for sex before they stumble upon a meteorite that has some kind of creepy crawly creature inside that quickly shoots into Rookerâs chest and latches on to his brain stem, and from there on out Rooker is now âpossessedâ as he develops an insatiable appetite for meat products while Banks, who feels guilty having kicked her older husband out of bed again, decides to agree to have sex with him that morning after she sees he was out all night, thus causing the rapidly growing organism within him to literally fall in love with her itself, thus the original idea that later in the film even though the creature winds up killing townspeople left and right, it REFUSES to harm her even when it has ample opportunity to do so. As for the performances, Banks is exceptionally hot and sexy enough that we can believe that an evil alien entity could fall in love with her, while Rooker rules the day as the rapidly degenerating rich older man who soon turns to killing animals and then, spreading his contagion to other humans to basically turn them into zombies (big surprise there) with the plan being to take over the entire planet as the organism has done to many others; Fillion is adequate as the heroic sheriff, getting some good lines and moments as he bounces off his co-stars; Tania Saulnier as the girl who survives an attack from the creatures but is imbued with the ability to understand their methods has the cute Southern teenager act down pat as she teams up with Fillion; and Gregg Henry as the foul-mouthed, redneck Mayor gets a lot of good scene-stealing lines as well. There were times during the film where I wondered if Fillion and his deputies would ever use their firearms, especially when confronted face to face with the Rooker-Monster, because they seemed unusually reluctant to do so, and a couple of supporting performances seem to miss the mark a bit, but the ending, with the beautiful, pristine, unmarked Banks trying to reason with her monster-husband while people around her are being possessed, deformed, and eaten, all the while the Air Supply song Youâre Every Woman In The World (her hubbyâs favorite) is playing, quite nearly brings the movie to the peak of absurdity, and helps result in a gory, gooey, gross-out affair that actually manages to be more clever than stupidâŚ
8/10