Even more unfortunately, Grant gets too close to a pulsing pile of slime in the woods, and soon he's haunting the deli counter at the supermarket, growling, '' Meat." Say what you will about the man, he does love his wife, even after he transforms into a giant tentacled slime monster. The mayor's convinced it's just Lyme disease; the police aren't so sure and plot their quarry's whereabouts on a map with little squid icons.
Every worthwhile horror movie since ''Alien" has its carefully worked out evolutionary calculus, and ''Slither" is no different. One of Grant's early victims becomes a giant human womb that releases millions of blood-red slugs that fan out across town, leaping into people's mouths and turning them into zombies controlled by the Grant/alien thingie. This means that whenever Starla encounters one of the undead, he or she insists on working out the couple's domestic issues. Can you do couples therapy with a hive mind?
The slug-attack sequences are giddy and terrifying -- drive-in cheese at its creepiest -- and the bathtub scene lives up to its billing on the film's poster. ''Slither" does for taking a good, long soak what ''Jaws" did for swimming in the ocean.
As rousing as it is, the gore's for the diehards. What makes a good horror-comedy work -- as opposed to all the teen dice-and-slice ''product" that clogs up multiplexes -- is sharp performances, sharper timing, and a willingness to admit to the genre's fundamental silliness.
''Slither" has all three. The acting is playful aces all around: Fillion gives good exhausted incredulity, Banks gives good virginal idiocy, and Rooker gives great conflicted monster arrogance even before the aliens get him. The film moves forward with the relentlessness of a low-budget nightmare, pausing every so often to point, giggle, shriek, and run away.
