'Tis the season to be spooky, as they say (whoever 'they' are), and so I thought it might be an idea to spend the last ten days of October watching and reviewing horror movies - a deadly and deathly delight for the last decade of the month. Ideally, of course, it would have been Thirteen Days of Halloween, but I've been ill the past few days and I never plan ahead, so ten it is. These will probably be slightly shorter, more off the cuff reviews than I usually attempt - yes, believe it or not, I do mostly try and put effort into this stuff - and so may even be an improvement. Mind you, when I just go with my instincts, it can lead to terrible things happening. Not that I'm likely to spontaneously ask any of you dear readers to marry me or anything.
Probably.
True story: in recent months, the changeable weather up here in the sunny (ha!) North East of That There England has led to a surfeit of slugs (I assume that's the correct collective noun) appearing in our front and back gardens. Real big buggers in all sorts of disgusting hues of brown, grey, sickly off-white... you name it. The bit that really freaked me out, though, was seeing a particularly large and menacing specimen in the cat's bowl, actually eating a piece of cat food. The thought that we were somehow breeding a species of carnivorous slugs in our garden naturally turned my mind to Shaun Hutson's schlocky '80s horror paperback (of which my childhood self owned a few, including the extremely icky and maybe not to be read by eight year olds Spawn), but more particularly the film version, Having not seen it since its BBFC truncated UK VHS release, it seemed as good a time as any for a revisit.
Helmed by Spain's Juan Piquer Simon - probably best known for the 1982 slasher classic Pieces, and possibly 1990s Abyss / Leviathan / Deep Star Six a like The Rift, but also tragically for the dreadful 1981 Jules Verne's Mystery on Monster Island (which not only wastes the talents of genre stars Peter Cushing, Terence Stamp and Paul Naschy, but is as Jules Verne as the horrendous Canadian movie H.G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come is Wells) and MST3K trash classic 1983's Pod People - the film transposes Hutson's grimy little tale from Merton. England, to Ashton, U.S.A. - doubtless the kind of summer town where the authorities won't close the sewer system during the season.
We open with Wayne (Eric Swanson) and his girlfriend (Karen Landberg) messing about in a boat on the Ashton reservoir. The young lady wishes to go for a swim but Wayne demurs, having spotted a sewage outlet pipe (he should try living in 2023 Britain - our rivers are all made of faeces). He does, however, dangle a foot off the boat into the water and is soon pulled in by "something slimy" and very shortly is reduced to a bubbling crimson cataract of blood. Cue credits.
We are shortly introduced to the town's health inspector Mike Brady (Michael Garfield, in his first credit since 1979 cult classic The Warriors) who is having drinks with his lovely wife Kim (the lovely Kim Terry), the local schoolteacher known to her wretched pupils - seriously, unlikable youths were a staple of '80s horror, weren't they, but were they always this bad? - as "the wicked bitch of the North", who manifests her wicked side by donning sexy black lingerie for fun bedtimes with her husband. If only they'd invested in some green body paint for a truly Wicked session. Sorry, there's my Elphaba fetish poking out. I'll just tuck that discreetly away. Mike and Kim are out with their friends David (Emilio Linder) and Maureen (Alicia Moro) Watson and trying to politely ignore lush (in more than one sense) Maureen's alcohol-induced misbehaviour. Excusing themselves for an early (sexytimes) night, on their way out they bump into Don Palmer (Philip MacHale) the town's sewage inspector who apparently now earns half the salary working for the civic authorities as he did as a plumber.
Mike is working with the truculent Sheriff Reese (John Battaglia, who I could have sworn was the same guy that played Tex in Robot Jox but apparently not. I swear I've seen him elsewhere though, despite what IMDB says) to evict local drunk Ron Bell (Stan Schwartz) from his condemned home, only to find that the unfortunate down and out gentleman has been consumed by flesh eating slugs - something that the sheriff, with his cry of "What next... demented crickets?!?" (look dude, don't give the 'when nature attacks' genre ideas. Plus, hasn't that been done?) fails to fully believe at first.
We get a series of great gory kills, such as when Maureen doesn't notice the overgrown slug in the lettuce she's slicing for the dinner salad, leading to David being internally consumed by slug blood parasites and his face exploding during a lunch meeting with clients; one of which is played by doyenne of '70s Euro horror Patty Shepard in her penultimate role before her sad early death from cancer. Then we have two of Kim's students: there's the brunette Donna (Kari Rose), who is enjoying some illicit sexy times with her douchebag boyfriend Bobby (Kris Mann) whilst her parents are out when the bedroom becomes rife with ravenous gastropods that strip the flesh from their naked bodies, in a scene that was cut from the '80s UK release but can now be enjoyed in all its gory glory. Bobby had earlier been introduced taunting the unfortunate Ron before his demise, so fuck him anyway. Then there's the blonde Pam (Tammy Reger), who has to escape the clutches of a jealous classmate-cum-skull masked attempted rapist by jumping down a sewer outlet only to be consumed by the vicious molluscs. The rapist dude never gets held to account either. Fucksake.
But the best bit of the film, for me, is when Brady goes to the town authorities and tells them to disconnect the water supply or he'll declare a health emergency and is told by the officious Phillips (Frank Brana) "YOU AIN'T GOT THE AUTHORITY TO DECLARE 'HAPPY BIRTHDAY'! NOT IN THIS TOWN!" Magnificent. Anyway, obviously Mike and Don have to team up to rescue the town from these slugs transformed from the norm by the nuclear goop. With some degree of sacrifice involved. I would and do highly recommend Slugs, both book and film, to any and all connoisseurs of the exploitative and goopy. You'll have a great time. I did, at both eight and forty four. I should probably grow up one of these days.
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