Slither (2006)

Dir. James Gunn

Starring: Nathan Fillion, Elizabeth Banks, Michael Rooker, Tania Saulnier 

 

I remember the advertising campaign for Slither fondly. It was 2006 and posters started to appear on the sides of buses. These posters depicted a young woman in a bath, while a swarm of menacing slugs closed in. I even discussed going to the cinema with friends to see the film. The posters promised campy B-movie-ish fun. How campy? Well, the DVD for Slither started with a trailer for Snakes on a Plane (which we did go and see at the cinema). 

Sadly Slither did not deliver on this promise. Snakes on a Plane had a wholly ridiculous premise and a stock cast of easily identifiable characters, superbly led by Samuel L. Jackson. It was kitsch and tongue-in-cheek and it knew it. Slither, however, is no more ridiculous than most horror movies (save for one solitary attack be a zombie deer). There are only three characters with any amount of personality in the film. It does not have any star names and, while there is a certain amount of dead-panning (tracking down the killer will, apparently, be like “finding a needle in a fuckstack”), there are few instances of real humour. There are two shocks in the whole film (shocks of the ‘sudden movement and loud orchestral chord’ school).

If the film were to have a subtitle it would be ‘Zombies Have Feelings Too’. Grant Grant (Michael Rooker) is infected by an alien slug thing. He immediately starts to hunger for meat and plot to infect first his small South Carolina hometown, and then the world. Eventually he unleashes a plague of slugs which infect people by leaping down their throats. This creates an army of zombies linked in a sort of hive-mind to Grant. But he still retains control of his former memories and feelings. His love for his young wife Starla (Elizabeth Banks) proves to be his real motivation even as his body transforms. 

I call Grant and his followers ‘zombies’. That is essentially what they are. It might perhaps be truer to call them ‘people reanimated by alien parasites’ but frankly if they look like zombies, shamble like zombies and hunger for meat like zombies, they’re zombies. And I’ve seen zombies before. Slither came out in 2006. Apocalyptic zombie horror 28 Days Later was released in 2002. Zom-rom-com Shaun of the Dead came out in 2004. I’ve seen fast zombies, strong zombies, comedy zombies. Slither did not really add anything new.  

There were B-movie elements lurking under the surface. I can’t help but feel that if writer / director James Gunn had surrendered to camp a more entertaining movie could have resulted. There were grumbling bloated wombs, slugs leaping down peoples’ throats, a wholly unfit-for-office mayor, the aforementioned zombie deer. But I felt that there were a couple of ‘messages’ shoehorned in. At first I wasn’t sure if the film was somehow trying to make a point about rape. We have a muscular man trying to infect (at first) pretty young woman by penetrating them with his two penis-like stingers. We have young girls struggling while slugs thrust themselves into mouths. We have a woman unawares in the bath while a slug swims towards her through the bubbles – shades of A Nightmare on Elm Street I thought. The film certainly does try to make some point equating the worm-thing’s hunting of humans to the humans’ hunting of deer. The town of Wheelsy is a hunting town. When Grant first infects Brenda (Brenda James) the scenes of his attack are intercut with those of the mayor (Gregg Henry) declaring deer hunting season open. I thought that this was some rather heavy-handed moralising for what I was hoping would be a camp horror romp. 

Slither isn’t completely unwatchable. It might be a somewhat familiar subject, but it maintains the ‘ick’ factor through some decent special effects. There needed, in my opinion, to be more grisly, faintly ridiculous deaths however. Elizabeth Banks does okay as the heart of the movie, and Michael Rooker is to be commended for projecting his hurt and love despite the layers of slug-y, squid-y prosthetics he gets buried under. I’ve seen worse zombie films. Unfortunately I’ve also seen a lot more that are better. 

 

Sadly her galpals were right: her husband was a slimeball

 

What have I learnt about South Carolina?

South Carolina must be huntin’-shootin’-fishin’ country. In Doc Hollywood we saw deer-hunters and dynamite fishers. In Slither we again have the same characters. The local police department have confiscated a grenade from a trout fisherman, and the economy of the town of Wheelsy seems to be largely based upon deer hunting. They have a festival (‘Deer Cheer’) to celebrate the start of the hunting season, and later on the sheriff is concerned that livestock killings and a missing woman will deter hunters. 

The surrounding terrain is one of wooded hills. The town seems quite isolated, with its nearest neighbour being ten miles down the road. So we are left with an impression of wild woodland and strung-out isolated settlements. The police department have an armoury of high calibre weaponry (though I am not sure how many of these guns actually belong to the police department and how many have been confiscated from hunters).

Can we go there?

The film is set in Wheelsy, South Carolina. Wheelsy, suffice to say, does not exist. And the film was not even shot in South Carolina. Filming took place in British Columbia in Canada. The town of Cloverdale was used for Wheelsy. This small town is principally famous as the setting of the young Clark Kent’s hometown in the series Smallville.

Overall Rating: 2/5

The Big Chill (1983)

Dir. Lawrence Kasdan

Starring: Tom Berenger, Glenn Close, Jeff Goldblum, William Hurt 

 

The Big Chill is not a Philip Marlow film noir (that’s The Big Sleep). It is not a music festival (well, it is, but that’s a different Bill Chill). This Big Chill is a 1983 film by Lawrence Kasdan with a cast destined for big things that looks at the inevitable pains of growing up and the loss of youthful idealism. It should be enjoyed with a side-order of tunes by The Jam in my opinion, particularly Scrape Away (“What makes once-young minds get in this state? Is it age or just a social comment?”) or Burning Sky (“We’ve all grown up and we’ve got our own lives And the values that we had once upon a time Are so simple now ‘cos the rent must be paid, And some bonds severed and others made”). Instead the sound-track is chock-full of up-tempo ‘60s stompers like You Can’t Always Get What You Want and Wouldn’t it be Nice that cast a rueful ironic shadow over the action.

In The Big Chill a group of former friends who met at the University of Michigan in the ‘60s are brought back together by the suicide of one of their number. After the funeral of Alex (an individual of whom we only see the wrists and ankles… but those wrists and ankles belong to none other than Kevin Costner, who was distraught to be cut from the final edit) they all stay for the weekend at the house of married couple Harold and Sarah (Kevin Kline and Glenn Close). For a number of them there is an element of trying to pick up their relationships from a long time ago despite now being different people with different problems and attitudes. By conventional standards they have all done ‘well’, and yet they are unsatisfied. Harold and Sarah have two nice homes; she is a doctor and he a businessman who is about to sell his chain of 26 stores to a larger rival. The spectre of Sarah’s affair with Alex haunts them however. Michael (Jeff Goldblum) writes for People magazine but chafes under the magazine’s dumbed-down editorial policy. Sam (Tom Berenger) is the star of the TV series J.T. Lancer (which appears to be a cross between T.J. Hooker and Magnum, P.I.) but worries that he is not taken seriously. Meg (Mary Kay Place) is a former defence lawyer who now earns the big bucks as a real estate attorney but who is unhappily single and desperate for a child. Karen (JoBeth Williams) has married well and has two children but is bored by her stuffed-shirt husband. Nick (William Hurt) used to be a successful radio psychiatrist, but has now dropped out; he is a regular drug-taker who suffers from impotence as a result of his experiences in Vietnam. In the ‘60s they were a rebellious generation. They have now become exactly the sort of people that they used to rebel against (I’m not sure whether it is a deliberate irony that Harold’s sports-shoe company is called Running Dog (as in the Maoist phrase ‘capitalist running dog’). The ‘chill’ of the title is what has happened to them. As Meg says, “It’s a cold world out there. Sometimes I feel like I’m getting a little frosty myself.” The one person who does not harbour all this existential angst is Alex’s young girlfriend Chloe (Meg Tilly) who is very much the odd one out in this circle.  

 

"Well I'm sorry, I thought you said you turned yourself into a pie..."

 

Which leads on to the mystery of why Alex killed himself. His friends rationalise that he was unhappy with the way his life had gone. He drifted from job to job. They told him that he was wasting his life, they hypothesise that he purposefully cut himself off from them all because he was so unhappy about where he was. These are just some of the protective rationalisations that Michael claims everybody needs to use to help them get through the day. More likely is that they lost contact because they were so busy playing The Game of Life. “A long time ago”, Nick tells Sam, “we knew each other for a short period of time… It was easy back then. No one had a cushier berth than we did. It’s not surprising our friendship could survive that. It’s only out there in the real world that it gets tough.” Alex saw what they had become and decided that the last thing in the world he wanted to be was like them. Notably the forthcoming sale of Harold’s business would have left him, as a shareholder, rich. As Mahatma Gandhi once said, Mo’ Money, Mo Problems. He was happy being an underachiever.

Probably the most honest and truthful overview of the situation comes from Karen’s husband Richard (Don Galloway). He is painted as a bit of a buffoon and a stuffed-shirt but he views the situation with open eyes. He is prepared to put up with a boat-load of crap to be able to provide as well as he can for his kids: “You set your priorities… But the thing is, no one ever said it would be fun. At least, no one said it to me.” His philosophy is a simple one. Maybe that comes from him being dull and not particularly insightful or deep. His wife and her friends believed that they could have it all, that they could make a better world. And now that they have betrayed their youthful idealism they feel rotten. 

The Big Chill is a good exploration of the mindset of a certain group of people from a certain background at a certain stage in their lives. It is not an infallible film. It is remarkable that so many of the same friendship group have gone on to be so successful in their later lives. Looking at the people I was friends with at university 13 years ago and who are now entering their mid-thirties there is a degree of success but nothing quite so comparable across the board. There is that same distance, that sensation of having drifted apart, followed by everybody dropping back into the same roles and the same conversations that were had at university. But we were never as open about feelings for one another or about personal problems (such as Nick’s impotence). There are one or two unlikely and unnecessary elements that have been thrown in. Nick is a troubled Vietnam veteran in true Deer Hunter style and there is a quite implausible suggestion from Sarah to resolves Meg’s problems. That being said, the characters are believable and well-played, the premise is good, and the direction allows the narrative to unfold at the perfect pace. The Big Chill is not a film of which I had previously heard, but I can understand its importance in being one of the first pieces to address thirtysomething angst. This is a new spin on the famous H.L. Mencken definition of Puritanism (‘the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy’). Why aren’t they happy too?

What have I learnt about South Carolina?

The landscape of South Carolina seems pretty bleak – or maybe that was just the storyline. We see low dun-coloured marshland coated with tussock grass, intercut with tidal creeks. And it seems to rain. A lot. Despite this there are some grand nineteenth century plantation-style houses. Harold and Sarah must be doing well to own one as just a holiday home while they have their main house in Richmond, Virginia. 

Can we go there?

The Big Chill was filmed in location in the coastal town of Beaufort (pronounced Bew-Furt), down in the south-western portion of the state. Harold and Sarah’s house is actually the Tidalholm Mansion on Laurens Street, and is a film star in its own right: it was also the main location of 1979’s The Great Santini. Nick and Harold jog down Bay Street in the middle of town. Sand Hill Baptist Church, just west of Varnville, was the scene of the funeral service. After the service the funeral procession motors down Bay Street. The tall humped bridge they cross is the Cat Island Bridge, which links Beaufort and Port Royal.

Overall rating: 4/5

Week 41: South Carolina

"Just a little bit south of North Carolina
 That's where I long to be;
 In a little brown shack in South Carolina
 Someone waits for me..."
 - 'A Little Bit South of North Carolina',
 Dean Martin

From the grand pleasure estates of Rhode Island we are cruising down the Atlantic Highway to the grand plantation estates of South Carolina. It really doesn't seem all that long since we were in North Carolina, but in its southern city the tobacco plantations were replaced with those growing rice and indigo. They were still dependent on slave labour however.

 

This maybe explains South Carolina's famous orneriness. The state was the first to declare independence from Britain in 1776 and the first to declare independence from the Union in 1861. When Confederate troops started shelling Fort Sumter in Charleston harbour it was the spark that started off the Civil War. Even after reconstruction it was one of the leading states to follow segregation. It was only in 2000 that South Carolina became the last state to stop flying the Confederate flag over the state house.

 

Despite this South Carolina is famous for its southern hospitality. Added to a muggy climate and swampy terrain this seems to make it more like its southern neighbour Georgia than its northern counterpart. I know that Charleston is a historic port town and it has been on my list of places in America to see. The Savannah shown during Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is what I expected Charleston to be.

 

I've had a bit of a mishap whilst searching out South Carolina movies. The one I thought was absolutely nailed on was weepy chick-flick The Notebook. The original novel by Nicholas Sparks was set, as is most of his work, in North Carolina (as in Nights in Rhodanthe). The film version relocated the action to South Carolina. However, I have been unable to get hold of a copy: neither Lovefilm nor Blackbuster seem to have it. My back up is likewise out of stock on Lovefilm - though to be honest it was more the name than the storyline that attracted me to Shag. So my three South Carolina movies are, in fact:

• The Big Chill (1983)
• Doc Hollywood (1991)
• Slither (2006)