It's October, so I'm watching horror movies, and nothing but horror movies...with the few exceptions being Halloween-themed stuff. I'll do another post about favorites, but this post is all about the movie Slugs. I just got it from Netflix, and watched it the same day. It's sort of a precious memory from my youth that I finally caught up to. I know I wrote something about being too scared to watch something as a child only to watch it as an adult and be disappointed. This was sort of toeing the line of that idea. I was disappointed, by the lack of exposed breasts, and it wasn't scary at all, but it was also a really good time. Camp to the extreme.
What was my favorite part? It might be the fact that verisimilitude was achieved by intercutting footage of real slugs along with the footage of the fake "stage slugs". The stage slugs tended to look at a lot like feces. So when the terror on screen hits you, it's not scary. You're just looking at a person covered in fake blood and glued on pieces of poop. But I think my favorite part was that the movie tried very hard to paint the portrait of a small town being besieged by killer slugs, yet the savior and go-to know-it-all was a British scientist who works at the high school. The high school. And he has a fully stocked lab that would be better suited to a college campus. But he's British, so you don't question him because he sounds smarter than you.
On top of all that, the film was a Spanish production. Everyone in the crew was Spanish. Half of the cast were American, while the supporting cast was Spanish. Everyone was dubbed. If you want to make sure that the crappy horror movie that you're planning to watch will be fun, make sure a foreign crew is trying to make their production look like it takes place in small town America. (East coast is the best because then things really feel out of place.) Another good example of foreigners making a movie that takes place in small town east coast America is Pieces. Tagline: You don't have to go to Texas for a Chainsaw massacre. But back to Slugs, which takes place in upstate New York.
A fun thing that sometimes happens when watching a movie is that the opening credits tell you shit you could never have begun to imagine or believed was true. For instance, regarding the movie Slugs, some really terrible movies are actually based on books. Slugs was a fucking book before it was a movie. It was written by Shaun Hutson. After writing Slugs, he also wrote the genre head-turners Relics, Spawn, Victims, Hybrid and a few other novels you see in airports. Someone had to borrow the idea for this movie from a book because they were stuck and had movie-makers block. Then they actually went to the bank and took out a loan so they could buy the rights to the book Slugs. (Here are some other movies based on books that don't seem like they'd be based on books: Who Framed Roger Rabbit, based on Who Censored Roger Rabbit; Dangerous Minds, based on My Posse Don't Do Homework; Die Hard, based on Nothing Lasts Forever; Bryanna Loves Jenna, based on the entire run of Hustler Magazine which is based on the idea of guys loving it when two naked girls get crazy together. Unfortunately, this did not happen in Slugs.)
So the American book, Slugs was bought by some Spanish filmmakers and they made a movie with a British scientist in it. We all know that British people have the world monopoly on legitimizing anything they say, and we also know that anyone foreign also speaks English with a British accent. (i.e. every Nazi in the history of cinema.) Therefore, by the virtue of having a British scientist in the film, Slugs is a great movie filled with scientific facts, one scene of fucking, lots of fake blood with too much red food coloring, and five inch long pieces of poo terrorizing the city of Merton.
And speaking of Merton. Merton has got to be the dorkiest name of a fake town in the history of fake towns. Merton. If Merton was a classmate of yours you'd have given him a dozen wedgies, taped him to his locker and broken his glasses. To illustrate my point of how anticlimactic a town named Merton is, here is the tagline of the book that was created to give your nerves a jangling and make you want to read every page of this fast-paced thriller!
"One female slug can lay one and a half million eggs a year - a fact which holds terrifying consequences for the people of Merton."
Everything about that sentence is fine, and it makes you curious I suppose, until you get t the word Merton. "Wow", you think, "one and a half million eggs a year...creepy". "Terrifying consequences! Sounds exciting!" "Merton?! What the fuck is a Merton?" Then you could care less. "The people of Merton." sounds like the most boring people ever to exist. I don't want to visit Merton's famous twenty year old flea market, or come to town for the annual parade of Mr. Merton who settled it in the late 1800's because no one wanted him to live with them in the nearby settlement of Somewhere Cooler Than Merton.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, please see Slugs. It's really funny and there are boobs in it. Next on the Netflix queue: Mountain of the Cannibal God. Is it a quality production? probably not. Does it involve cannibals who have an unhealthy sexual fixation on star Ursula Andress? Why yes, yes it does.
