DVD Tuesdays: Slither Is Here and I'm Psyched
I love talking about movies, but I've never been able to organize movie-night get-togethers. So this is the next best thing: On Tuesdays I'm going to spotlight a DVD and suggest some virtual-discussion starters.
Halloween - my absolute favorite holiday of the year - is right around the corner and one of my favorite genre films of this year is debuting on DVD: How perfect a confluence is that?
Slither received what I call a "hit and run" release: If you didn't see it the week it opened, you probably didn't see it at all. And it did a fast fade despite unusually good reviews. So maybe the studios that don't bother to screen horror movies in advance are right: Nothing critics say about them, good or bad, can sway the hard-core genre audience.
Why that audience didn't turn out for it I can't say, because
Slither pulls off two of the toughest tricks in the filmmaking book. First, it successfully mixes humor and horror - note the emphasis on the word "successfully." For every
An American Werewolf in London there are dozens of movies that get the proportions wrong and wind up flopping miserably between two genres. And secondly, it's a great, self-referential homage to horror films of the 1970s and '80s, one that can stand on its own two feet.
Bucolic Little Wheelsy is the quintessentially quiet small town filled with sordid secrets, ripe to be plunged into chaos by a night caller from outer space. So naturally, the meteor that lands in the Wheelsy woods is carrying a gelatinous space slug intent on world domination. It hijacks the body of Grant Grant (
Michael Rooker, of
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer fame), the kind of bullying local-guy-made-good whom no one is especially sorry to see harm befall, and uses him to incubate an army of space slugs. They slither off to infect the townsfolk, one by bloody one, and next thing you know the fate of the Earth rests on the shoulders of Grant's trophy wife, as well as those of the easygoing local sheriff (
Nathan Fillion) and a plucky teen who survived a close encounter of the disgusting kind.
Generally speaking, I like my horror straight. But
Slither made me snicker
and squirm. Writer-director
James Gunn (who wrote the 2004
remake of
George Romero's
Dawn of the Dead) piles on the in-jokes and nods to films ranging from the famous -
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956),
The Blob (1958),
Night of the Living Dead (1968),
They Came from Within (1976) - to the obscure - notably killer-worm slimefest
Squirm (1976) and
Night of the Creeps (1986), itself a deceptively perky horror pastiche with a dark sense of humor. But he also knows how to stage a suspense sequence and how to set up punch line.
So what's the difference between a homage and a rip-off?
There are two schools of thinking on humor and horror, both of which start with the fact that laughter relieves tension. One school believes that fright-film audiences need some downtime between scares, the other holds that the scares are the whole point and there's no room in the spookhouse for mirth.
Most of today's horror filmmakers look to the '70s for inspiration: movies like
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,
Halloween[,
Last House on the Left,
The Hills Have Eyes,
Suspiria,
The Wicker Man,
Black Christmas,
The Amityville Horror,
It's Alive,
The Exorcist and
The Omen. So why did the '70s spawn such a bumper crop of influential horror pictures? And does the fact that almost all the above films have been remade or are in the process of being remade mean that creativity is dead in the horror genre?
Remember: Send your movie questions to
FlickChick.
Previous DVD blogs:
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick
Also:
This Week's New DVD Releases
