Slither

Bomb Rating: 

"The Blob" meets "Tremors" meets "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" meets "The Hidden" meets… oh I could just keep listing them.

I had some kind of notion that Nathan Fillion from "Firefly" might actually have some talent. Sadly, he's beginning to manifest some similarities to William Shatner. Fillion, like most actors who get their start in television, found a project where he could play exactly the same character he played on television. Is a challenge such a bad thing?

Oh sure, he's hick sheriff Bill Pardy here and he's fighting mutant space worms on Earth, but that basically sounds like something he might do in "Firefly" as Capt. Malcolm Reynolds. Maybe here Sheriff Pardy's just a bit less smart, but Fillion is employing that same, mildly smarmy attitude to flesh out the character. It's not exactly a tour-de-force of acting. You think you might be ordering steak and the waiter brings you a rotting carcass. I had flash-forward vision of Fillion on talk shows 30 years from now complaining about typecasting and how he never made it big because people always saw him as Captain Reynolds.

The other issue I had with this film is the woman playing the lead character, Starla Grant (Elizabeth Banks). I spent the whole film trying to figure out whether she was Rachel McAdams or not. They look exactly alike, if you ask me. Maybe they grow these actresses on a farm or something. Starla is married to Grant Grant (Michael Rooker), who's the first to come into contact with the space worms in a film best described as "The Blob" meets "Tremors" meets "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" meets "The Hidden" meets… oh I could just keep listing them. Basically, this is just a bunch of ideas from other horror films edited together.

The worms go in through Grant's mouth, take over his body, then transform him into Jabba the Hut. The only real difference between this film and, say, "The Hidden," is that whenever the worms get inside somebody, they still have Grant's thoughts. They're a -- stop me if you've ever heard this before -- a collective consciousness! That apparently means then that if you kill their leader they all die. Either that or they lose all direction and wander around aimlessly searching for other bodies to inhabit. Thankfully, it's the former.

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