Advertisement

There’s a part of me that wishes I could make a better argument for Slither on thematic grounds, but the film is all entertaining text, precious little subtext. Gunn doesn’t seem to have anything in particular he wants to say about small-town life or marriage or politics or sexual anxiety, though all are incorporated into the story one way or another. If anything, Slither could be read as a horror film for vegetarians, because it reserves so much contempt and revulsion for dumb hicks who slaughter deer for sport or make terrible gluttons of themselves. Beginning with Grant Grant, the zombified humans in the film are mindless consumers of meat—and not just any meat, but truckloads of butchered, uncooked ribeye and whatever live animals are unfortunate enough to cross their path. The parasitically afflicted hosts in Slither get grosser the longer they stick around—an instinct no doubt left over from Gunn’s time at Troma—but they also get larger and take on mass. There’s the sense that if the plague goes unanswered, the result would be untold millions of people combining into one giant, sweaty, all-consuming beast. Like this poor woman, perhaps, only infinitely larger:

Advertisement

As for the abundance of sexually suggestive images, Slither has more grotesque body horror and vaginal openings than a David Cronenberg film festival and a Georgia O’Keefe exhibit combined, but it seems like a case of Gunn making visual jokes for the sake of it. Grant’s mutually unsatisfying marriage to Starla manifests itself in aggression and phallic mutation, but Gunn doesn’t spend much time on their relationship before the creepy-crawlies start to come out. Slither abounds with movie-geek references and genre commentary—and it relies, to some extent, on the audience picking up on it—yet it’s geared heavily toward broad, crowd-pleasing fun. It slavishly recreates the feel of one-half of a cheap-o sci-fi/horror drive-in double-feature, only with expert craft and a modest (but not inconsiderable) studio budget.

And Gunn finds the perfect leading man to do it in Fillion, a cult icon in the tradition of Bruce Campbell or early Kurt Russell—masculine, ironic, put-upon, and willing to withstand just about any force thrown at him, natural or otherwise. Rooker’s evolution into a monster may be the best piece of acting in Slither—hilarious and disgusting yet pitiable at the same time—but Fillion has an alternate-universe movie-star presence that’s key to the film working. Gunn writes him a lot of lines that are simply reactions (e.g. “Well, now that is some fucked up shit.”) that ping off his bemused nonchalance; he specializes in the type of character who might look upon the craziest happenings imaginable with curiosity or frustration, but never surprise. Born into another generation, he could have been Han Solo or Jack Burton.

Advertisement

Above all, the shame of Slither’s orphan status is that it really shouldn’t have been an orphan at all. A lot of cult items have some distancing element that narrows their appeal to a self-selected few, but apart from the gross-out moments, Slither is defined by a rollicking populism that should have put a general audience in its corner. Gunn knows where the laugh lines are, knows how to tease viewers with misdirection (the grenade bit is particularly brilliant), and knows when to pause a beat for applause at the big payoffs. Sadly, the ovations never quite materialized in a theater.

Coming up:
May 5: Double Team/Knock Off
May 19: The Vanishing (non-shitty version)
June 2: Schizopolis