Damn Lyme Disease
I just got back from a screening of Slither, a fantastically funny horror film starring Firefly/Serenity’s Nathan Fillion. I wasn’t really familiar with James Gunn (the writer/director), but I’m definitely a fan now.
The movie had, in my opinion, perhaps the best balance of comedy and horror I’ve seen in a movie, though it definitely tipped towards the comedy side of the fence. The dialogue was great (almost too good for such a campy film) and everyone’s timing was just dead on. I had been warned about the gore factor beforehand but I didn’t think it was really that bad. In fact, I went in hungry, and left craving steak and marzipan (don’t ask.)
There was also a great little Q&A afterwards with James, Nathan, and Michael Rooker (the heroine’s husband turned alien cannibal squid flesh katamari thingie.) It was very informative. Apparently Gunn’s cat gets a “little girl being molested” look when it has to go to the vet, Nathan spent most of the film doing nothing and does a great impression of a 1920’s film director, and Michael got to manipulate a prosthetic alien vagina with his foot (when the prosthetics weren’t causing him pain… Ouch).
Slither made me think of Shaun Of The Dead, though I felt that overall, it worked better. The latter tried to cram too many genres in, and I found the pathos of Shaun’s mother and best friend dying to be rather depressing. Slither is much more upbeat. When cute little girls convulse horribly and die, it’s funny! Plus, hive-mind alien zombies are so much cooler than regular old boring brain-eating zombies. I never got the zombie thing myself.
I was also reminded of Monster by Christopher Pike (I had every book by Christopher Pike as a kid) due to slight similarities in the plot (small town flesh eating alien possession.) That book always made me crave steak too.