Nathan Fillion

Remember when horror movies used to be fun? Dawn Of The Dead scribe James Gunn certainly does. Slither, his first Hollywood film as director, is a low-budget, low taste, high entertainment splatter thriller that offers a two stump salute to the dour sadism of modern chillers like Wolf Creek and Hostel. Serenity’s Nathan Fillion, admirably deadpan as ever, stars as a smalltown sheriff fighting off a million slimy slug monsters from outer space. Seriously, just how cool does that sound?

Slither’s tone will be familiar to anyone who shrieked and giggled through those classics of 80s body horror - The Fly, Re-Animator, and The Thing. Where the 70s gave us grit, grainy cinematography and unrelenting suffering, the 80s were all about eye-popping gore. Slither, an unashamed tribte to those glory days, offers rampaging killer slug-things, telepathic zombies and a remarkably sympathetic bloated squid monster, all in the same movie. "He can’t be that hard to find," sighs Fillion’s impeturbable sherriff. "Where’s he going to hide? Seaworld?"

"DELIGHTFULLY EXCESSIVE SPLATTER"

While this isn’t an out and out comedy, there are more than enough zinging one-liners to keep you grinning between the delightfully excessive splatter setpieces. Fair warning: it is extremely squirmy at times, and anyone who can’t look at a snail without swooning would be well advised to stay away. For the stronger stomached viewer, though, Slither is an absolute treat. Imagine for a minute that David Cronenberg, in the days before he got boring and respectable, had made a film with a young Joss Whedon. Between them, they might have come up with something very much like Slither.

Slither is released in UK cinemas on Friday 28th April 2006.