Creature Features: Slither

It's no secret that Tim loves creature features and James Gunn, so it should come as no surprise that Slither is one of Tim's all time favorite creature movies!

So... it's a movie about aquatic slugs?

The plot unfolds something like this: A sleepy little town in the middle of nowhere is the first Earthly stop for an extraterrestrial parasite bent on world domination. The town's sheriff and a ragtag group of towns folk are the only ones standing between this single-minded monster from space and the rest of the planet.

James Gunn's first feature as directer: Originally Gunn had written this as a script to sell, but was talked into directing it, despite no longer being interested in the horror genre.

Not even the worst he'll look.

The creatures: There are a variety of exceptionally gross creatures in this flick, and the longer things go on, the larger and grosser those creatures get. By the final scene Michael Rooker's wearing one of the largest practical monster effects I've ever seen an actor actually inside of. Evidently the weight of the massive apparatus caused Rooker injuries that persist to this day.

Always read the whole script: Another of the massive creature apparatus was worn by actress Brenda James. However when Brenda signed on to the project, she'd only read the script through her character's first appearance, so when they asked her to come in for a prosthetic test, she was a bit confused. She decided to read the rest of the script on her flight to the effects studio and, according to her, once she fully realized what she had signed up for, she spent the rest of her flight sobbing.

That's how you get lyme disease.

The Mayor looks familiar: Gregg Henry (who plays the mayor) is Star-Lord's grandpa in the Guardian movies, and the second lead in Just Before Dawn!

Box office bomb: This movie was a flop for the studio, but it's a fun movie that didn't get a fair shot. The poster doesn't tell you much of anything and the trailers sold it as a straight forward horror, so maybe if audiences had known this was a horror-comedy it would have done better. But horror-comedies never do well in the theater, even ones that became classics later on, so maybe this gem was doomed no matter what.

This Ghana poster represents the tone of the film one thousand times more accurately.