Slither review – James Gunn’s Troma-style comedy horror debut gets a reboot for reputational glow-up

This grotesquerie-heavy exercise in comic body horror was writer-director James Gunn’s first feature in 2006; a commercial flop at the time, it was Gunn’s crack at the big time, made long before he went on to direct the likes of the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise, the most recent iteration of Superman and take over as head honcho for the DC cinematic universe. His subsequent success (apart from that time he got briefly cancelled for ill-advised tweets) might partially explain why this early work is getting a glossy repackaging now. It’s the film industry equivalent of a reputational glow-up, as if a flawed, underwhelming early work should now be considered a misunderstood work of genius.

Sadly, Slither is by no stretch of the imagination a work of genius. Its science fiction elements are thinly conceived, while the use of rubbery practical effects and lame jokes feel much closer to the work of the Troma brand where Gunn got his training wheels. The main conceit here is that an alien lifeform, whose larvae look like flaccid phallic worms with severe sunburn, crash lands on Earth via an asteroid and then proceeds to take over a small South Carolina town. The first to be possessed is Grant (Michael Rooker, a Gunn regular ever since), a good ol’ boy with a unhealthy obsession with his wife Starla (Elizabeth Banks, displaying her typically professional comic chops); she still has a soft spot for local head of police Bill (Nathan Fillion). One by one, members of the town are penetrated through various orifices by the worm larvae, some of them becoming evil minions and some, like unlucky area woman Brenda (Brenda James), turning into hideously swollen incubators for further larvae.

There are fortunately a few bright spots of wit and amusement. Gunn’s penchant for deploying AM-radio classics in contrapuntal fashion, one of the major tricks in the Guardians films, gets an early outing here by setting a particularly gnarly killing spree to Air Supply’s cheesy ballad Every Woman in the World. And the cast certainly seems to be in on the whole joke, or at least must have felt all those hours in the makeup chair getting swaddled in latex was worth it in the end.