I think you're probably a pretty cool guy. I thought Dawn of the Dead worked out really well, and you're obviously more legitly into horror films than Aja or Roth or uh I don't think there are any other memorable recent horror directors. So, please take this review with all the possible love you can associate from it.
I don't really care one way or another if Gunn had actually not seen Night of the Creeps until he finished filming Slither. I find it kind of hard to believe, if just for the fact that the edited version was shown on my local FOX and UPN stations ad nauseum during the 90's, to say nothing of the USA and TNT networks before they became bland holes where dramas go to die or get in the missionary position with Law and Order. But let's assume that somehow he never watched it. Here's the quote from Wikipedia which really bothered me:
However, Gunn has stated that David Cronenberg's Shivers and The Brood were the two biggest influences on the story in Slither, along with the manga Uzumaki by Junji Ito.what.
I can accept Shivers was an influence, in the stupidest way possible. I occasionally forget that the movie involved weird worm things, but the vague psycho-sexual angle, sure. Whatever, it's honestly not a very good movie which is only mentioned because Cronenberg fans are tiresome auteur morons. But The Brood? There really wasn't even a hive mind in that film if one stopped to consider a few things. I'm not going to get into Uzimaki, except to say I guess "inspiration" now means circling all of Ito's full page images in red pencil and writing "FUCK YEAH" on the margins.
I mention this first because Slither really doesn't seem to know what it ever wants to do. One strong reason for believing Gunn is that Night of the Creeps is drastically more successful as an homage to horror than Slither. The former seems completely at ease throwing around casual horror references and casual sadism, but Slither just won't stop winking at me, hoping me to acknowledge that it totally knows all about what scary is but any minute now a parameter is going to change. That's not to say that Slither doesn't have amusing parts, but they're usually awkwardly appended in between plot advancement. Stuff happens, Michael Rooker does something realistic which is sort of amusing I guess, then other stuff happens, so on. You could have removed around 80% of the jokes and the movie would have happened the same way. It also doesn't help that Creeps was effectively parodying both older horror and the same teen scream drek that was being produced around it. Slither is purely backward looking, maybe afraid to offend the twin devils of mental sadism and twice-warmed over slashers that plagues the genre today.
And speaking of Michael Rooker, oof. Maybe I'm alone in this, but what happened to him after Henry? I guess one doesn't want to get typecast as a singular personification of mindless evil, but is "diluted as hell mixture of Bruce Campbell and Tom Atkins" really that much better? Your horror comedy sort of has a problem when the most likeable character is the selfish and greedy mayor, and you cheer when the designated folksy symbol of order is about to die. Then there's the female characters, of which James has two types that have shown up in all of his goddamned films.
1) Protagonista, who has no real personality aside from what is ascribed by other characters and occasionally does strong stuff to show that she is not really a weak woman.
2) Teenage Girl Filmed with Weird Sexual Angle, who is both normal and quirky and does strong stuff fairly regularly to show that she is not really a weak woman.
(oh yeah I guess there was a slut in Dawn of the Dead whoops)
I'm apparently in the minority as far as my feelings towards this film, as a majority of critics loved being hit over the head with OKAY IT IS TIME FOR A JOKE. It makes sense in a way, Slither is that sort of horror movie that critics love, creative enough that critics can feel like they're seeing some big paradigm shift in the genre, while not weird enough that anyone is taken out of their comfort zone. Slither does get stars for at least avoiding ever getting emotionally attached to its subjects and thus completely dropping the humor ball (sup Shaun of the Dead), but honestly, everything about the movie just feels conventional and safe within the context of horror. You can occasionally see some attempts to really show how UNCHAINED FROM HOLLYWOOD HE TRULY IS with stuff like having kids or characters in the vein of harmless friendly supporting character getting killed, but that's predictable in its unpredictability.
(Spoilers about as far as a movie like this can really have spoilers) The best example of this problem is at the end, where a SHEEPLE horror director would have had the possessed zombie people wake up after the slugs died. But nope, they're apparently all dead. I'm sure Gunn was really banking on this really upsetting people, but neither my girlfriend nor I really gave a shit, because at no point in the film was there anything that made us give a shit about this town. Like the rest of the film, Gunn seemed more intent with shocking us with laughter or some other terrible buzzword phrase instead of considering what might make a film scary and funny -at the same time-.
Slither's not a straight up bad film in the level of alot of the stuff I talk about on here, but it was just such a monumental letdown, yet another in the line of false pretenders claiming to "revitalize" the horror comedy (though Slither was better than Hatchet, if we're ranking). At some point we'll probably find someone willing to take on the subgenre without falling back on the conventions of years past, but until then, I'm just gonna wait for someone to thrill me.
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