Slither & An American Haunting

With Halloween only a week away, the new horror releases are coming in fast. I'm doing my best to keep up, because I'm committed like that, but it's a constant struggle. What I'm saying is, I haven't bathed in 4 days...

Slither

The illustrious screenwriter of Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed, James Gunn, got his start with Lloyd Kaufman's underground Troma company. The uninitiated aren't missing all that much; Troma specializes in the sort of schlocky Z-grade campfests that seemed shocking long ago, before mainstream studios regularly opened films like The Devil's Rejects and The Hills Have Eyes on 2,000 screens.

Gunn's major studio directorial debut, Slither sits halfway between these two worlds, marrying the perverse irony of Troma to an old standby Hollywood formula, the small-town-invaded-by-creepy-monsters-horror-comedy. All these years later, Gremlins remains the flagship of the genre, though admittedly it's weighted more to the comedy side of the equation.

Unlike Joe Dante's holiday classic, Slither is not entirely successful as either a horror film or a comedy. The make-up effects and monsters are more disgusting than scary and the jokes are rarely amusing.

Yet the movie kept my interest and proved significantly less predictable than most American horror films. On the small-town-horror-comedy-o-meter, I'd rank it a 6...Not as good as Tremors, but a lot better than Eight Legged Freaks. Around the same level as Arachnophobia, if that's any help to you.



Like I said...disgusting...The tiny unnamed hamlet at the center of Slither has been invaded by an alien species that reproduces like a disease. Thousands of tiny worms enter human hosts, bending them to the will of a single, conscious entity from outer space. Kind of like The Borg, but more gooey. Over the course of a few days, the alien wrecks total havoc on the town, replicating itself inside most of the cities' residents and chasing around the beautiful wife (Elizabeth Banks) of its initial victim (Michael Rooker).

Clearly inspired by David Cronenberg's bloody slug-based sex comedy Shivers and the Alien movies, Gunn's put a lot of thought into the monster's replication cycle. Local cop Bill Pardy (Nathan Fillion, of "Firefly" infamy) and his ragtag band of deputies and hangers-on stumble upon all manner of gruesome affronts to all that is holy. In the film's showcase sequence, they discover a woman stuffed to the size of a barn with baby alien worms, voraciously eating dead rodents in order to satisfy the millions of tiny lives within her massive gullet. It's just as gross as it sounds.

The make-up effects are really great, visceral and evocative. They give good ooze, is what I'm saying. Gunn adds in some nice little touches as well. It's clever how, after the initial scenes shwoing the spread of the infection, the movie transitions into a Romero-esque zombie film. And unlike the similar-in-appearance "shit weasels" from Dreamcatcher, these aliens mercifully prefer to enter hosts orally.

Just being creatively gross is enough to please the 15 year old demographic, the target audience for a killer worm from space movie. So, as far as Gunn's likely concerned, mission accomplished. Still, the movie has the right attitude and Gunn demonstrates the techinical acumen to turn in a better horror flick than this mediocre effort. It's just that the script isn't really funny and the characters suck.

The only person to make an impression at all is Gregg Henry as the town's boorish and cowardly mayor. Everyone else pretty much blends into the background. Plus, there's just not a single memorable line or big laugh in the entire film. It's frequently amusing but never inspired.

Now that Hollywood studios have completely given themselves over to producing this kind of cult cinema, there's a few principles they should keep in mind.

(1) People watching these movies don't even care about the illusion of a real story, so the 45 minutes or so of exposition that's standard in most horror movies can be trimmed considerably.

(2) If you're already releasing a gory, R-rated horror film, you might as well throw some tits in there. I mean, if Elizabeth Banks doesn't want to show off her body, that's fine, get some other actress in there in a smaller role who will. There are, like, three different "tease" scenes Gunn includes to toy with his male audience, threatening to show nudity (and even possibly getting a brief shot of a nipple in there somewhere) but never actually going through with it. Hey, genius, the movie's already R! Maybe they're just waiting for the DVD.

(3) The final after-the-credits shot that sets up your movie for a sequel is sooooo played.

An American Haunting

I've seen some ludicrous movies make use of the "based on true events" tag line before, but An American Haunting may be the most ludicrous. What begins as a 19th Century remake of Poltergeist takes a very strange turn in the Third Act, defying not just the film's internal logic but the entire Western mythology surrounding ghosts. I don't believe any movie in which the spirit world actively intervenes in human affairs could be considered based on reality, but the leap of faith required by An American Haunting would make Michael Landon hesitate.



I hate horror movies that open with bookends. In fact, scratch that, I hate movies with bookends. Scenes at the beginning and end in which secondary characters reflect on the film's main action are pretty much guaranteed to be drawn out and pointless. An American Haunting is no different. Some dumb broad walks in on her daughter having some kind of a mid-nightmare fit. She then finds some yellowed, old letter said daughter brought down from the attic. The entire movie is contained within this letter. This sequence stole five minutes of my life and I want them back.

Okay, so, the action described in this letter (which looks like it's only a page long but eats up 85 minutes of screen time) takes place in 1817 in Tennessee. (This must be the part that's sort of but not really at all based on a true story). John Bell (Donald Sutherland) is having a land dispute with an ornery old neighbor, rumored around town to be a witch. When she's displeased with the final court settlement, she places a curse on John and his willowy daughter Betsy (Rachel Hurd-Wood).

Writer/director Courtney Solomon throws in just about every haunted house cliche ever invented. We get slamming doors and windows, nightly thunderstorms, little girl ghosts with hair covering their faces, eerie whispering, horrifying visions, possessed objects, shattered mirrors, extinguished candles, self-activating fireplaces. You name it, Solomon's attempted to make it scary once more.

This movie's a considerable improvement on Solomon's only previous film, the humiliating debacle that was Dungeons & Dragons. Thank God, at no time does Jeremy Irons appear and instruct the Bell children to fetch him the Rod of Power. Still, as a director, he's extremely klutzy and fairly amateurish.

He returns to the same completely retarded shot over and over again during all the film's "haunting" scenes. The camera woozily swoops around the room in what appears to be the Ghost's POV, catching goofy reaction shots from each character present at the time. Worse yet, he frequently switches between color and black-and-white photography, back and forth, in the middle of scenes. I honestly have no idea what possible impact Solomon thinks this kind of jarring, obnoxious stunt will have on the viewer. It's somewhat disorienting, but not in the kind of way that enhances the intensity or meaning of the shot. Just in the way that makes you stop and think to yourself, "Did that just switch to black-and-white and then back? Why the hell would he do that?")

I will say that the period is fairly well-evoked, considering the obvious budget constraints. Dungeons & Dragons just looked cheap, whereas American Haunting looks spare but authetnic. And the performances from Donald Sutherland and Sissy Spacek as his tormented wife are pretty strong, off-setting the rest of the film's occasionally campy enthusiasm.

But even if the film were less generic and more interesting, my enjoyment would still have been marred by that weird, impractical ending, which I will give away in the next paragraph.

SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT

The bothersome ghost turns out to be a portion of young Betsy's soul that escaped her body when she was raped by her father, John. I could see this making sense if Betsy were unconscious for the entire film. Her body's still alive but her soul is loose in the house, running amok and making trouble for her naughty father. But she's very much awake and self-aware and possessed of a soul. In fact, for most of the film, she's the one being tormented by the ghost, not her father.

So she's haunting herself? Her soul actually was divided in two without her noticing? The paranormal manifestations are actually the result of unconscious psychokinetic powers? I'm sorry but I just don't get how a living person can be a ghost.

And then when we go back to the bookmark, Betsy's ghost turns up again to warn a mother in our time that her daughter's likewise being felt up. Huh? So now Betsy's actually dead, but her ghost still looks like a little girl and haunts the same house, just in case some new resident unfortunately encounters a sexual predator? Weak...