Really Awful Movies

Slither features what look like worm sperm and Nathan Fillion (of TV’s Castle), who’s since grown too big by half and starting to look like a turret.

Back in 2006, however, he was the svelte town sheriff, doing battle with the aforementioned creatures in this creature feature that’s a loving throwback to 50s monster movies with the added bonus of some Lynchian weirdness (there’s a really odd karaoke version of The Crying Game performed in a sad-sack saloon).

In the tradition of the great monster movie deus ex machinas of the past, a pod comes hurtling to earth and there’s something weird inside it. Towney Grant (a grizzled Michael Rooker, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer) is out fornicating with paramour Brenda in the woods and interrupts his coitus to see what’s amiss. The pod shoots a dart into his chest.

Meanwhile, the town of Wheelsy, South Carolina gets down at the Henenlotter Saddle Lodge, a boisterous sh*t-kicking saloon, and no, the Frank reference isn’t lost on us. Hell, we just revisited the awesome Brain Damage so when it comes to worm-like creatures f-ing up people’s synapses, we’re there.

Soon, the pod effects are starting to take their physical toll on Grant. He comes back to wife Starla (the always charming Elizabeth Banks) and explains away his facial deformity as a “bee sting.” Meanwhile his forest paramour Brenda has been tied up in a nearby barn, impregnated by Grant’s slug babies.

Soon, the worm slugs have multiplied and are sliding down the gullets of townsfolk. It’s pretty nasty stuff.

However Slither is a total joy.

It’s a near perfect mix of unrelenting disgusting gore and great zingers like “What kind of thing wants you to eat it?” and “You ever heard of anything like that? Huh? Me neither. And I watch Animal Planet all the f*cking time!” Gregg Henry as Mayor MacReady steals the show, but the cast is great and treats the material with the seriousness it very nearly deserves.

DEFINITELY check it out.

Be sure to also listen to our discussion of Slither (and Squirm) with Daily Dead’s Scott Drebit on the Really Awful Movies Podcast.

**** (out of 5)

“Dead is dead!…you have more chances of re-animating this scalpel than of mending a broken nervous system!”

Being big fans of Re-Animator, about which noted critic Pauline Kael said, “the bloodier it gets, the funnier it is,” we thought we’d take another look at this re-animator, the funny Young Frankenstein (which she happened to mention in the same breath in her review).

Here Dr. Frankenstein (played by Gene Wilder and pronounced Fronk-en-steen) is a Lancet-reading med school instructor and reluctant and embarrassed descendant of the infamous doc. He’s on a trip to Transylvania. There, at the foreboding mountaintop castle he decides to resume his grandpa’s experiments, re-animating the dead with the help of hunch-backed and oblivious to said condition, the ineffectual assistant Igor (eye-gore).

There’s musty books, dusty passageways, creaky doors, winding staircases, candle-lit corridors and a hodgepodge of cobwebs, all hallmarks of the 1930s Universal Pictures Frankenstein movies and lovingly rendered in rich black & white by legendary gag-man, director Mel Brooks. And of course, there’s a giant machine with electrical coils, complete with a variety of mysterious levers.

“Such strange goings on! What IS this place?”

The doc finds his grandfather’s private library, a revelation met with a glorious lightning strike.

He then gets down to business of bringing the dead back to life, in this case a being 7-feet in height, stolen from the local graveyard, into whose cranium he implants the brain of one “saint and scientist” Hans Delbrück.

Terri Gar is terrific as Inga, who substitutes “Ws” for “Vs,” and Cloris Leachman delights as Frau Blücher. But it’s Mary Feldman as Igor who really steals the show in a baroque bug-eyed comic turn.

Horror has gone from cautionary tales about scientists discovering the “the secrets of bestowing life” here, to the dead coming back to life through external forces (radioactive contamination, viruses, and whatever the latest zombie film iteration is).What’s endlessly fascinating about horror though is that it reflects cultural anxieties of a particular age. The original zombie films were grounded in xenophobic fears of foreign religious customs such as Haitian folklore/practices), while the 1950s took as their influence fears over the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

And filmmakers like Stuart Gordon and Mel Brooks revived older fear traditions, giving them a new spin for new generations, familiar with the older traditions of horror via the medium of television.

***1/2 (out of 5)