IT’S A WONDERFUL MENACE
“Slither”, 2006. Written and directed by James Gunn. Starring Michael Rooker, Nathan Fillion, Elizabeth Banks, Gregg Henry, Tania Shaulnier, Brenda James, Don Thompson, and a boatload of b-movie mainstays.
Now playing at local theaters and hopefully at every small town screen in America.
There’s a reason why space aliens so often land in a hick towns. Having come from one of these dunderheaded hamlets, I can say with authority that the thought of battling with some kind of slimy creature was inspiring. For you folks who grew up in the cities, you’re missing out on the visceral thrill of these films. Movies with spaceships or meteors that crash into earth make you think that those woods around your house–which in reality hide nothing more than beercan-choked deer blinds, used condoms, and old tires–might in fact harbor a beast that’ll keep you awake at night. Which is better than falling asleep to David Letterman again.
Slither is a part of this grand tradition, and I’m glad for it. I saw it with a loud and boisterous crowd and it reminded me of my moviegoing days from long ago. Back in the day, I used to waste many a Friday night at Mt. Pleasant’s Ward Theater with some schlock horror film. My friends and I would talk back to the screen, loudly and frequently. That’s one of the great joys of the movies–being able to voice your displeasure at a movie that suggests, say, that a young woman would willingly tiptoe down the rickety steps of a dark basement that is crawling with flies and smelling so putrid it makes her gag. That’s worth barking at, with a good chuckle.
Slither has sprung, like the grotesque worms of the title, from the mind of one James Gunn, who is a product of the somewhat infamous Troma factory, the studio (if you can call it that) that produced buckets of cheap horror videos. Those films were awful, but Gunn–who wrote the very entertaining Dawn of the Dead remake–learned something along the way. For Slither is a b-movie masterpiece, a freak show so good it could have come straight from old Coney Island. It’s that scary, that awful, that hideous, and that much fun.
The facts: A meteorite drops out of the sky one balmy autumn evening, plopping into the woods behind the hard luck town of Wheelsy. This is your typical small town, as I remember mine, and well rendered: bored folks, wealthy folks in their McMansions, oversexed folks who are looking for a quick screw, tired cops, and some bums and losers who look like they wish Diane Arbus were still around to snap their picture. Cheap bars and strip malls, ugly high schools and boarded up old stores. Michael Rooker plays one of the town’s wealthy studs who is rejected one evening from a little love by his social-climbing, though loyal, wife (Elizabeth Banks). Frustrated, he heads out into the woods with a girl he met later in a bar, finds the aforementioned meteorite, and gapes at a slug-like creature crawling on the forest floor. Which, of course, attacks him, shooting a slimy pin into his gut which turns him into a monster. As time progresses, he gets worse, grunting “meat” over and over, satiating this desire by disemboweling cats and dogs and cows and deer. And humans, of course.
Things get progressively worse. Amazingly worse. People are eaten, filled to bursting with millions of gelatinous worms, attacked by said worms in bathtubs and churches, split in half by tentacles, burrowed into, feasted upon by the undead, and absorbed buck-naked into what looks like a cross between Jabba the Hutt and a giant squid. Among other horrible fates. Slither gives a nod to just about every cheap horror film ever made and between my wife and I we caught references to: Jaws, Beauty and the Beast, King Kong, every undead film in history, Cronenberg’s Fly and Rabid, the remake of The Thing, maybe A Streetcar Named Desire (the beast shouting “Starla!”), and–I can’t believe I remember this–John Carpenter’s unbelievably stupid Prince of Darkness. That one, for those not in the know, was the one in which Satan possessed people by spitting gunk into their gaping mouths. Which occurs in Slither with abundance.
I’m certain there’s more: if you see this film, let me know what I missed.
Slither is an outrageously gory and well-executed thriller, which made me jump and flinch throughout. Auteur Gunn knows how to take his influences and hang them on a solid plot with goofy but likeable characters, and while it’s a stretch to call a film with so many references original, it’s certainly as fresh as a newly killed cat. Like many of the great cheapies, Slither is full of odd conversations between b-movie stalwarts like the inimitable Rooker, future b-man Nathan Fillion (of Firefly fame), overcooked ham Gregg Henry, and Banks, doing her damndest to become the new Adrienne Barbeau.
Slither will no doubt vanish in a month, nothing more than a dim memory from an evening of screams for kids and adults from Hicksville to Omaha. See it now while you can, in a rural, one-screen theater, with a long drive home past darkened cornfields and ominous woods.
TOOTHLESS IN WASHINGTON
“Thank You For Smoking”, 2006. Written and directed by Jason Reitman. Starring Aaron Eckhart, Cameron Bright, Maria Bello, Sam Elliot, Adam Brody, Katie Holmes, Rob Lowe, William H. Macy, Robert Duvall, and the underrated J. K. Simmons.
Now showing at the Uptown Theatre.
My father is a rabble-rousing, former hippie liberal, my father-in-law an extreme right-winger, a lover of Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh. I have no doubt that if I could get these two to shut up for two hours and hauled both of them to see Thank You For Smoking, neither man would be offended at what they saw. Bored, perhaps, but not offended.
God save us if the best we can do for satire in America is this made-for-tv movie. Without its simpleminded swearing, this thing belongs on Fox with a nod and a wink and a bevy of reviewers claiming it’s the greatest satire since they threw the last shovelful of dirt on Paddy Chayefsky. Is it so much to ask that your irony have some bite to it? Thank You For Smoking, for its heavy lineup of top notch actors, succeeds only in being a tedious string of one liners that were edgy, maybe, in 1996. Note to Director Jason Reitman (and maybe novelist Christopher Buckley): jokes about Birkenstocks were stale in the 80s, for God’s sake.
Thank You For Smoking features a cast of some of the finest character and supporting actors we’ve got, from William H. Macy, the underrated J. K. Simmons, the underused Maria Bello (obscenely wasted), the perfectly slimy Rob Lowe and relative newcomer Adam Brody, not to mention Sam Elliot and Robert Duvall, for the love of Christ. The movie is ostensibly about spin, which makes me think that it might be fascinating just to see how this damn film got made, and how much of this magical spin was used to convince everyone to hop on board. The barely-beating heart of the film is lobbyist Aaron Eckhart’s relationship with his son, Cameron Bright. This plot, thin as it is, would have been much more powerful if the son were narrating the thing, giving us a clearer view of this conflicted man from a more neutral standpoint. This didn’t happen and the story is an unholy mess, with little subplots that come and go and details that seem to be forgotten. I wonder what the movie would have been like in better hands. Reitman might have promise, though he would have to fall from his father’s tree and roll a good city block–pop Ivan Reitman’s got to be the worst comic director in history if it weren’t for Blake Edwards.
Sadly, almost every actor has one decent scene to strut his or her stuff, independent of the plot, which makes the movie seem like a very professional high school forensics tournament. Duvall was so good at describing a mint julep I wanted to run out and grab one. J. K. Simmons does his usual bluster, which I love; Sam Elliot is great as a dying Marlboro man; and Rob Lowe and Adam Brody are creepy, doing their high-powered agent schtick, with Lowe an unsleeping powerbroker who wears a giant kimono.
All of which makes me want to run to the seance table and call Chayefsky back to the old Underwood. It’s not enough for a filmmaker to toss these scenes at us, joke after joke. We need to see how characters respond to these existential laughs. It doesn’t help that Thank You For Smoking’s humor seems ten years old and lacks even the muted guffaws of a poor week at The Onion, but it’s got no characters anyone can relate to. Had old Paddy lived long enough to write Thank You, we might have had something with guts and character, and even quite a few heavy and uncomfortable laughs.
