Nathan Fillion

Slither

Directed by James Gunn (Canada, U.S.)

Reviewed by Manohla Dargis

The slimy little creatures that wiggle into the mouths of the seriously freaked-out characters in "Slither" are meant to have originated in space. In truth, these delightfully repellent critters, which look like fast-moving leeches, squirmed out of the brainpan of the film’s writer and director, James Gunn, a horror savant who has obviously put in some time with the collected works of both George A. Romero and David Cronenberg.

Romero’s zombie nation lives in shadow form in "Slither," a film about a fecund extraterrestrial with an insatiable appetite for flesh. But it’s Cronenberg’s interest in oozing orifices and spiky protuberances that seems to have left the biggest impression on Gunn.

There are plenty of orifices, protuberances and ooze in "Slither," along with enough raw meat to suggest that despite the usual disclaimer about no animals being harmed during this production, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals will soon be on the march. The monster that spawns all those slithering creepy-crawlers has a cattleman’s appetite for filet mignon. (What’s for dinner? A cow.) The monster also has a taste for cat and dog, and a deep affection for the little lady its host body, a small-town tough named Grant (Michael Rooker - Henry in "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer"), was forced to leave behind. Her name is Starla (Elizabeth Banks), and Starla’s smile still shines bright even after her husband, Grant, has transformed into a fairly unnerving Jabba the Hutt look-alike. "Marriage," she says, "is a sacred bond."

So are movies, or that’s the idea, anyway. The pleasure of horror isn’t simply that the best films make your toes curl and force you to check the locks, but that they require a particularly strong connection between the audience and the director. Like comedy, horror is difficult to master because it requires nuance. So many contemporary horror films just pour on the blood and sadism; it’s absurdly easy to grab the audience’s attention simply by sawing off an arm. Real horror demands more than a romp in a charnel house; it requires dread, mystery, awe. It also requires that the audience suspend its cool long enough for a director to deliver the goods.

Gunn is credited with writing the very good remake of Romero’s zombie classic "Dawn of the Dead," which shouldn’t have worked but did because it both followed the genre rules and bent them, mostly by making the zombies move frighteningly fast, just as they do in "28 Days Later ..." directed by Danny Boyle. The accelerated pace might have seemed heretical (and Romero himself remains a firm adherent of the slow-moving undead), but it was just the kind of tweak that can make a familiar setup seem fresh.

In similar fashion, what makes "Slither" work is how nimbly it slaloms from yucks to yuks, slip-sliding from horror to comedy and back again on its gore-slicked foundation.

The humor tends to skew toward the obvious and goofy, though some of the best jokes are also the more understated, as when the would-be hero chief of police, Bill Pardy (the very fine Nathan Fillion, late of "Serenity"), on his way to a showdown with the monster with a posse of heavily armed deputies, pauses to lock his car with a chirping remote key. This small, inane gesture effectively puts the action on pause, drawing out the tension, and underscores the ordinariness of the designated good guy. It also makes you think about logistics, a critical component of a genre that demands a certain pragmatic savvy from its characters.

The characters who make it out of a horror film alive seem to come equipped with a kind of survival manual: They know how to plunge a stake through the vampire’s heart and when to fire a silver bullet.

The men and women in "Slither" seem fairly hapless by comparison: Their guns don’t do the trick, and the grenade the police department keeps locked away looks as if it’s been gathering dust since the fall of Saigon. Gunn doesn’t seem interested in stirring the pot with politics, but not long before the big finish, Bill turns to a teenage girl (Tania Saulnier) and tells her how, when it’s all over, he will need to be remembered as the hero of this story. Even as the monster stands poised to wipe out the town, this guy is thinking only about his image.