Paying tribute to his Lloyd Kaufman roots with a shot in which The Toxic Avenger is on TV in the background, James Gunn's Slither is more in line with the hipster revisionism of his screenplay for Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead update. Postmodernism its point, then, drying up the musty cellars somewhat of the films it riffs on, Slither misses when it does only because it has little resonance beyond the basic Cronenbergian sexual-parasites thing and the shopworn idea that Americans are voracious, disgusting, ignorant swine. (In truth, the one moment that really bugs me is a fairly demented rape sequence (involving more infant-menace than anything in the new The Hills Have Eyes) and its played-for-giggles fallout.) In place of useful sociology, it does for redneck archetypes what Shaun of the Dead did for workaday slobs, poking fun at the thin line between slack-jawed yokels (initiating deer season with a barn-busting hoedown) and beef-craving, slug-brained zombies (recalling that NASCAR now boasts its own brand of meat). The biggest surprise is that Gunn appears to have seen and liked Night of the Creeps, and that, like that film, Slither does what it does without sacrificing too much of its good-natured, self-deprecating sense of humour along the way.

Poor Starla (Elizabeth Banks) is married to heavy-breathing good old boy Grant (Michael Rooker) in the kind of small, backwoods community where the sheriff, Bill Pardy (Nathan Fillion), carries a torch for Starla from way back in elementary school. When Grant goes off in the woods with Brenda (Brenda James) following a night of frustrated amour with Starla, he poignantly pokes a space slug with a stick, gets impregnated with a mind-controlling parasite, makes a nest in the basement out of leaves, and buys a lot of steak. It's a long time before somebody notices that something's amiss with Grant, a gag expanded on later when a family of zombies goes after the eldest daughter (Talia Saulnier), walking like tenderloin-looking space slugs might walk if they suddenly sprouted arms and legs--the idea that the bumpkins of Podunk, USA are ridiculous, graceless cattle, moving in time with the herd. But the satire (it feels more like the kind of ribbing that male friends engage in) is without any kind of edge, and the cast is uniformly up to the task of presenting the material with the appropriate level of reverence. Except for that extended alien rape sequence, Slither just never feels patronizing or mean-spirited. Granted, rape should never be comfortable to watch, but it's so at odds with the tenor of the rest of the film that it's gratuitous.

The rape establishes, however, a certain lawlessness in Slither alongside a real interest in grotesque-ifying the American gothic in a new "household" that Grant (starting to look a lot like Belial from Frank Henenlotter's Basket Case--indeed, a bar in the film is called "Henenlotters") sets up in an abandoned barn, bringing home the bacon, as it were, and spreading his seed in one explosive, crimson guignol of a sentient-slug ejaculation. The film is disgusting and, in its way, it's sad, too--and it's that element of the pathetic that reminded me the most of the tightrope described by Ron Underwood's cult classic Tremors. In both, there's a tenderness attending the treatment of its essential human relationships as they're challenged by these extreme circumstances--and in both, whenever an innocent is killed, there's never the sense of complete anonymity that would make the bloodshed not less funny, but rather damnably inconsequential. There's the girl who tries to save her little sisters in vain, the fate of the rape victim, the missing posters for dogs named "Roscoe" that start cropping up before the other shoe drops in earnest, the way that Starla plays on Grant's essential loneliness, and a final, apocalyptic tableaux that's surprisingly affecting. By the end (especially once Starla gets a little enthusiastic in her bloodlust), the laughter starts to sound a little like hysteria--and that's a really good thing. It's possible, in fact, that Slither's subtext holds a lot more than it appeared at first glance--that maybe these orally-transmitted zombies are representative of how minds are changed in our shouting culture; of our dangerous condescension to and marginalization of the red states; and of how the pods and the cult of neo-cons aren't shambling anymore. Now they've got teeth, and a real desperate taste for meat.-Walter Chaw

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Published: April 5, 2006