Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!
What’s the dumbest movie monster? It’s a surprisingly competitive field. You have the carrot-shaped alien from It Conquered the World!, for instance, but if we stick with more real-world creatures there are still going to be some serious contenders. You might go with The Attack of the Giant Leeches, or perhaps The Killer Shrews. Both of these probably pale in comparison with Night of the Lepus and its horde of giant bunnies. But we’d have to give serious consideration to the central beastie in Slugs, or Slugs, muerte viscosa in its original name.
This is a killer slug movie. I’ve watched it and I still can’t believe that that is a sentence I have actually typed. This is a movie where the monster that will be plaguing people is a massive horde of meat-eating giant slugs. When I call them “giant slugs,” I’m not talking about something the size of a pit bull or even the size of a chihuahua. These are maybe footlong hot dog sized. That’s plenty big for a slug, of course, but we’re not talking about things that can tip over a car. Even more entertaining is the fact that this isn’t a made-for-cinema story. It’s actually based on a real book that was produced by a real publisher.
It probably won’t come as a shock that our mutant killer slugs are going to have been caused by a toxic landfill near the town of Ashton, state not mentioned. We’ll get a few early kills by the killer slime critters, who are only too eager to sink their little fangs into the local populace. On the “let’s save humanity” team we have Mike Brady (Michael Garfield, and sadly not Robert Reed), the local health inspector. Helping him out will be his friend Don Palmer (Philip McHale), who works in the sewers, which is where our slug population is going to breed.
The path this takes is exactly the path that you are expecting it to take. A few people get munched on by the killer slugs, the local authorities don’t take it seriously, and the intrepid team of Mike and Don do all they can to figure out what is happening and solve the problem. If that were all that happens in Slugs, this would be just a weird movie with a bizarre choice of creature gone wild. But that’s not all that is of note in this film.
For starters, the slugs are magical in the movie monster sense. When they attack, they move at lightning speed. If someone steps near a slug, suddenly the thing is halfway inside their foot. They also swarm in groups that defy logic. In one scene, a young couple takes a break from having sex (since as in all horror movies, premarital sex is punishable by death) and are attacked. They are instantly covered in slugs, and soon eaten down to the bone. How did that many slugs get into the bedroom to carpet the floor? Unknown. How come none of them climbed on the bed? Shut up; it wasn’t in the script.
This is something that will happen over an over. In another scene, one of Mike’s friends, a real estate developer (Emilio Linder) eats a salad that had a giant slug inside the lettuce. Eventually, this is going to kill him. But consider this: his wife created a massive salad that included a slug that we literally see chopped up when she cuts up the salad. The guy eats the salad and the slug parts without noticing that he has eaten slug bits along with the lettuce. And then, when this finally kills him (it was some sort of internal parasite in the slug that has also been weaponized), basically he goes from a bloody nose and a cough to having his entire face melted off in a couple of seconds.
The acting in Slugs is ridiculously wooden, with line readings at times that feel like they were learned phonetically, and may have been. The people in the film are dumb, their reactions to things are equally dumb, and this isn’t even mentioning the fact that, near the end, a girl at the local Halloween party is sexually assaulted by another party goer. And what happens to her? Eaten by slugs. What happens to the guy who legitimately attempts to rape her? Nothing.
In a final indignity, a local high school science teacher is recruited to help stem the tide of the slugs. He comes up with a concoction that will explode when it comes in contact with water, and will also kill any slug it touches. He describes this as a “lithium-based arsenic.” Arsenic is an element on the periodic table. This would be the equivalent of saying “lead-based oxygen” or “nitrogen-based gold.”
Years ago, I read a short story collection that included a tale named “The Quest for Blank Claveringi” by Patricia Highsmith. In this story, a professor named Avery Claveringi hears about a species of giant man-eating snail. He goes on a trip to find and scientifically classify them, which would also give him naming rights. He naturally finds them—15 feet tall and hungry for flesh. Of course, the story ends with the professor being nommed on by the giant escargots. The best thing about Slugs is that it reminded me of this story, which is surprisingly good and actually pretty disturbing despite its weird premise.
Why to watch Slugs: Just as Medieval scribes drew little snails in their manuscripts, so too must we battle with mucus-y critters
Why not to watch: Boy, is it dumb.
No comments:
Post a Comment