To complete the Naruto-esque animal trifecta goin on this month, we’re doing the “slug one”.
Well, re-doing, i’ve reviewed this.. more than 10 years ago, so i’m gonna give it a fresh rewatch, even if i do kinda remember some of its ultra-ridiculous scenes, it’s not every day you see shit like a killer slug being accidentally sliced and served into a salad, causing a man to vomit blood and overact so fiercely it could chew the scenery faster the aforemention, doped up aggressive slugs.
In a way it was bound to be a cult classic, since it’s directed by Juan Piquer Simon, a spanish exploitation film director that by then already directed not only the grindhouse slasher cult film Pieces, but also the superhero knock-off of Supersonic Man and the infamous ET rip-off, Pod People/Extraterrestrial Visitors, which was later made a cult classic when Mistery Science Theather got his hands on it, spoofing many scenes and in turn making that episode a cult classic of its own, with the “idiot control now” spoof song and the “Trumpy” riffing making it a must-see episode.
And no, the english title (the original Spanish one being “Slugs: Muerte Viscosa”, translating to “Slugs: Slimy Death”) of Slugs The Movie is oddly accurate, this is based on a book of the name same by Shaun Hutson that released in 1982.
in a way it was a well overdue (yet fitting in a stupid way) addition to the killer animals subgenre, since Frogs released a decade earlier, but unlike that one were the frogs were just one of the animals revolting against the humans, this is mostly about the titular animal, slugs, which are indeed an even more ridiculous creature to repurpose for a “nature revenge” B-movie.
Maybe even more than worms, like, regular ones, but i’m not gonna talk about Squirm.
Not today, at least.
Still, i don’t think there was a “killer slugs movie” before, or since, so it gets (and gets to keep) the brownie points for that, and it’s not like these films traded themselves on anything more than gore and novelty in terms of what animal to make rabid and dangerous to humans.
Definitely not original plots, since you and i know the formula very well, we danced this dance many, many times before, and this doesn’t stray off the blueprint forged in the 50s.
In this particular istance, it’s a swarm of slugs that invades the sewer system of a typical suburban american small town, and from there making their way into gardens, their salads, they even get into the town’s water supply. Carnivorous slugs, complete with inexplicable fangs.
A healthcare assistant finds about these slugs, realizes the dangers these pose, but of course the authorities will not believe you, especially if you get in the way of the local sheriff equivalent and his passionate quest to get fatter and keep their buttseats hot and bothered, because even tangibile proof would require the police to do anything.
So it’s up to our protag to find an ally in a bespectacled scientist that decides to examine one of the killer slugs brought to him, cook up a chemical mixture to kill the gastropod bastards and help the healthcare assistant in doing so by luring all the killer slugs in a certain place, so he can throw the mixture in the sewers and flamebroil their ass hard.
In a way, it’s not a movie about slugs, but a cautionary tale for the american sewers system and how it could lead to them making Alligator III: Sewergeddon one of these day.
So this isn’t that strange of a movie for the genre, the plot is a typical killer animals B-movie affair in structural terms, it hits all the expected notes, but what it elevates Slugs into cult status is being proper, genuine “so bad it’s good” material, they really don’t make these like they used to, where they did expect people to stumble on these eventually but didn’t provide their own shitty Rifftrax/MST3K wannabe commentary already baked in.
Slugs The Movie is pure distilled cinematic arse, dumb as they come, bursting with plenty of ridiculous, superfluous shit that is come off as funny, it’s hilariously bad, even right away you’re confused, with a couple fishing and the boyfriend getting killed in the water by… something.
Could be a shark. Could be a lake crocodile. Could be even a killer Gastrodon.
Not that it matters, since you’re not gonna look at the fake underwater blood bubbling up, but the girlfriend randomly undressing to her top and thong, gotta reel the target audience in.
Also, as i said in the old review, it’s still funny to me that the italian dub (yes, somehow this got an italian TV and-or DVD release back in the day) is basically a reunion of the old VAs for the original anime adaptation of Ranma ½, which was mad popular here at the time, and still is beloved.
That aside, it’s the kind of movie that can only be reviewed by describing the scenes, since there’s a cornucopia of weird ass goofy scenes of any kind, but i think the garden one exemplifies the film as a whole, starting off with this bumbling old married couple straight of a 50s american sitcom that i think we’re gonna dye regardless of the slugs, since the set of events leading to their deaths somehow included a self-inflicted axe amputation and explosions… are frankly too silly to describe, and yes, to the point the first time around i had to rewatch the scene just in case i simply didn’t remember the absurd Rue-Goldberg style set of events-accidents, but nope, it was really that dumb.
Second place goes instead to the scene meant to explain why there are fucking fanged slugs in the first place, where we learn they’re actually riddled with thousand of small vampiric worms (which actually exist, they’re called Schistosomes, AKA “blood flukes”), with the excessive exposition dumping by the scientist implying that are these that are actually eating the people from inside…..which doesn’t really explain how that means “wereslugs” grew fangs, or where did they get the parasitic blood worms to begin with.
Oh wait, toxic waste is to blame for them becoming carnivorous and fanged, obviously.
It just happens i guess they also carried the fuckin vampiric worms, just in case the ooze didn’t turn them into a minor Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles antagonist they fought once and never again.
Again, “parasitic vampire wereslugs” make as much sense as the random opening scene of a man almost getting ran over by douchebags, seeing a random dog with a leash coming his way and deciding the dog is his now, just in time for us to see him getting final notice warnings letters, trying to eat a cold pizza slice, then falling asleep on the couch before he screams, the editing implying the slugs in his basement were eating him (and not the pizza).
It’s the classic formulaic B-movie writing meant to “connect the death scenes” (and some coitus because i assume it gets the slugs in the killing mood, i dunno) together more than anything, and admittely the effects are good ol fashioned pratical gore, and do look fairly good, a lot better than expected given the low budget, despite having that rough quality to it, plus the shittiness of the fake ass “electrical visual effects” and the goofy obvious wereslug handpuppet do add a lot of charm, especially when now cheap ass Popeye-xploitation films can’t even be bothered to craft Popeye’s face and instea use CGI so shit it really might have been GenAI shit.
(And yes, somehow we’re not done with those, i know that Popeye The Slayer Man 2 got greenlit as i wrote this)
I’ll stick to my fanged slug puppet, thank you very much.
Even audio is laughable, there is some obvious bad dubbing of the spanish actors, but that doesn’t really explain the absolute drunkard method the music cues and tracks are inserted at random, so for example the action music for an intense car ride to potential danger stars to immediatly die, as the car ride itself was too comically short to warrant such musical punctuation.
I’m surprised that there aren’t too many istances like that, to be honest, which is a pity, it’s so dumb it’s actually funny to see the “action” on screen randomly set to unfitting tunes, and it’s even funnier than the restored version has different music for some sequences…. just it’s a different kind of unfitting, like the brief ass car ride that leads to the police finding the first victim of the slugs, this time set to inspiring, hopeful sit-com music for 10 seconds. XD
not that the top billed English language actors are much better than the spanish ones, the actings is below subpar all around, punctuated by some fierce bouts of overacting (the guys who starts bleeding like a hose into his drink, for one), the characters exist just to eventually be eaten by the slugs, but again, this also contributes to make the whole things a hilariously bad mess of a film.
Slugs The Movie does get brownie points because surprisingly Juan Piquer Simon was kind enough to simply borrow the slugs from some greenhouse or something, as related in the closing credits, though i assume he also didn’t kill them because reparation costs would be easily double the entire film budget on their own, not that any animals really deserves to die for a D grade film like this.
As tradition, in the finale we see a single last slug that somehow survived, yet somehow, Juan Piquer Simon never made Slugs 2 (nor anyone else tried to), as he stopped directing feature films in 1999 with “Manoa, la ciudad de oro” (lit. “Manoa, The City Of Gold”), after that he worked on a couple of Spanish TV series, did an interview about his life work for the biopic “Pieces Of Juan”, and back in 2011 he passed away in his hometown of Valencia, Spain.
But since we’re still talking about his films, it’s fair to say its legacy of a cult exploitation filmaker will live on.
In conclusion, with Slugs The Movie we have a B-movie (or below, easily below) cult classic, a so-bad-its-good opus for the ages that is still a blast to see with a like minded group of friends, ready to see some hilarious cinematic arse as it still retains a quality most modern bad films have simply forgotten, or pretend to, since you can be incompetent, you can have one of the more ridicolous premises for a “ killer animals flick”, yet you can still be fun, especially since the scenes are strung together by cheese and often fuckin hilarious due to the sheer absurdity, or the somehow straight faced nature of death scenes so weirdly elaborate and comical they would fit perfectly into a hypothetical Mr. Bean horror movie (which i don’t want to ever exist, for the record, even ironically i do not want it).
Also, you’d be surprised how gross and gorey a dumb movie about killer slugs could be.
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