The Twelfth Night of Halloween

ON THE TWELFTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN I re-watched James Gunn’s Slither (2006). Okay, a lot of people love this movie. And given Gunn’s recent mainstream icon status, Slither is held up as proof of his authentic indie chops. My problem is that watching it now, the script does not work. I think the idea was to do a pastiche of 80’s movies like Night of the Creeps, which was already a 50’s pastiche—so a pastiche of a pastiche—but to ground it in the human character drama of its central love triangle. But the human character drama is actually terrible by today’s standards. Nathan Fillion’s protagonist sheriff is a pining “nice guy” who can’t get over his ex. And the ex, played by Elizabeth Banks, is grievously underwritten, doing no more than performing the function of being longed for by Fillion and being unhappily married to Michael Rooker’s local rich jerk. So, the two lead characters we are supposed to sympathize with—and, somewhat uncomfortably, are supposed to hope get back together—are both passive and pathetic. Meanwhile, the most interesting corner of the triangle is the antagonist, who, because he’s played by Rooker (“Henry Portrait of Serial Killer” himself), is delightfully monstrous and inexplicably terrifying, even before the alien mind-control slug he discovers in a meteor infects and mutates him, so as to employ him as a Typhoid Mary for taking over the rest of the town with its wormy spawn. 

At the same time, once again, this movie ignores the lessons of Cronenberg’s Shivers about how to create psychological depth with this subject matter, even as its sole gesture toward originality is to try to introduce greater human stakes. As a result, the main pleasure to be gleaned from Slither lies in its peripheral details: the magnificent practical creature effects, which are an inspired fusion of Rob Bottin’s work on The Thing and Stuart Gordon’s From Beyond; a number of memorable lines, the best probably being the absurdly larvae-swollen Brenda James’s “Something’s wrong with me”; and a handful of particularly well-composed shots, such as the bathtub attack. 

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And so, with that, we have now completed our review of the entire canon of notable cinematic works in the micro-genre of sci fi horror about intelligent mind-control parasites bent on infiltrating humanity (besides a few edge cases, that is, along with a number of TV instances, including episodes of both the original and the revival Outer Limits, various 90’s-era Star Trek runs, and miscellaneous other sci fi series). As I think I’ve made pretty clear, my main conclusion is that within this canon, only Cronenberg’s 1975 masterpiece Shivers really stands as a significant work of art worth watching and rewatching.

Watch Shivers! It’s free to watch on Tubi!

https://tubitv.com/movies/447847/shivers