Slither

For today's contribution to the 2018 Horror Binge I watched James Gunn's first feature-length film, the horror-comedy Slither. This is one I've been wanting to watch for years but have somehow never gotten around to watching. With my appreciation for Gunn's other work (his tweeting aside), I was pretty excited to see his "origin story" so to speak. 

Slither is part zombie, part monster, part alien movie, and a pretty damn good one at that. An alien life form lands outside a small town, infecting Michael Rooker and making him look like a diseased nut sack.

See? Not even an exaggeration.

The alien begins to spread in the form of meat eating slugs spawned from the Alien brood mother's fat cousin, creating meat-eating alien zombies all along the way.

Ya don't say. Also, Violet Beauregard wants her look back. Willy Wonka deep cuts up in here.

Really though, what the alien-Michal Rooker hybrid can't get past is it's true love: Elizabeth Banks, his wife. As more and more bodies become part of the alien hivemind, really what Slither is about is true love; if you truly love someone, sometimes you gotta set them free. In some cases, with propane and a gun. Truly touching. 

I have to hand it to Gunn, he does a stellar job prioritizing the horror of his film over the comedy. There's plenty of funny parts that are well worthy of a solid lol, but this doesn't result in a lessening of the horror aspects. The practical effects are incredible and I would venture to say even give The Thing a run for it's money. If you know anything about me, you know that's high praise. Everything is just the right level of over the top, with camp and crazy monsters done right. The movie can be truly disgusting, and I loved every second of it.

This is one of those solid creature features (zombie movie? I guess it's both) that needs to be in the discussion for best of the genre. It's entertaining, occasionally silly, and takes it's monsters, their look especially, seriously. Gunn once again shows himself to be a helluva talented director, giving a unique voice to even things that have been done to death (i.e. the alien creature invasion). The movie has attitude and other creators in this genre could take a page out of the Slither book on how reliance on CGI is often a detriment to your film. The alien beings here feel real because they are created in a realistic fashion. 

In other words: I dig.

10/10