Nathan Fillion

GOOD GORE: Slither both funny and icky, and it works

Slither is a movie designed to tickle your funny bone and make your flesh crawl, and it succeeds wholeheartedly on both counts. This is a quintessential midnight movie, with immediate cult status assured for horror and science-fiction fans.

This film’s got it all: alien slugs, mutant mammals, flesh-eating zombies, projectile vomiting, small-town stereotypes.

The fun begins when a meteorite lands in woods surrounding Wheelsy, the sort of jerkwater town where the citizens still drink Tab and pine for the days of Air Supply on top-40 radio. If ever a town deserved a hostile alien takeover, Wheelsy is it.

Nathan Fillion (formerly of TV’s Firefly) plays the new police chief. Elizabeth Banks plays the girl he’s loved for years, but she’s married to the town fatcat (Mi-chael Rooker), who becomes the first victim of the alien infestation and its primary incubator (don’t ask). Tania Saulnier plays the obligatory teenager caught up in the ghastly proceedings.

The cast plays it with the pro-per tongue-in-cheek spirit, especially Gregg Henry as Wheelsy’s obnoxious mayor and Rooker as a monster-in-the-making. And lots and lots of gore. So much gore that it becomes comical, which is clearly the intent.

Writer/director James Gunn packs the film with plenty of in-jokes and blunt metaphors. The last thing a film of this kind wants or needs is a sophisticated approach, but it takes undeniable smarts to combine shock and sarcasm as smoothly as it’s done here. Slither is as funny as it is icky, if not more so.