From James Gunn (a name I swear I’ve heard in porn before), who started his writing career with the deliciously absurd and offensive Tromeo & Juliet, played the role of Minute Man for the 20 or so people that saw The Specials, then spread his cheeks for Hollywood by writing the unnecessary but mainstream favored Dawn of the Dead remake, followed by the equally unnecessary (and oh so abortion worthy) Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed. One thing’s for sure, if the establishing shots from the flick’s opening are any indication, and the tit-heads in Tinsel Town insist on going ahead with that Evil Dead remake they keep threatening us with, Gunn should be a definite consideration for the director chair, cuz he’s got Raimi’s “PoV cam swooping through the woods” signature shot down like nobody’s business… or “bidness” slash “biz-naas” as the case may be.
Channeling his Lex Luthorian Mallrats character (in that, well, he’s bald I guess…) more than, say, his Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer character, Michael Rooker is the unfortunately named Grant Grant; our story’s central catalyst character. Instead of dealing with Jason Lee’s Dysentery-inducing “Stink Palm” though, here Rooker is instead infected with an alien parasite from another world that gradually transforms him into a tentacled breeding ground for the next generation of galactic slug monsters… This doesn’t bode well for his doting wife Starla Grant (Elizabeth “The 40 Year Old Virgin” Banks) and what doesn’t bode well for Starla in turn does not bode well for their small backwoods town of Wheelsy’s Sheriff Bill Pardy (Nathan “Firefly” Fillion), who’s carried a torch for the little lady since high school… back when she married old man Grant for “financial security”.
Grant’s infection turns into a town-wide infestation when his nest of dog-dick looking space mollusks burst from their squishy “queen” and go all Night of the Creeps on the civilians in a realization of Starla’s “Darwin’s Theory of Survival of the Fittest” speech from her first scene. Can Sheriff Pardy step up and fill the size 40 badass shoes of Mr. Tom “Master Blaster” Atkins for this updating/knock-off of the ‘80s creature feature classic? Does he have the testicular fortitude to take down a population of amorphous, enzyme barfing, parasite-ridden rednecks who all share Grant’s hive mind, using little more than Lord Atkins’s old school revolver and makeshift hairspray flamethrower, or will he rely on nancy-boy heavy artillery like hand grenades and the tired old dues ex machina who likes to rear her ugly head in cases like this? Any limp-wristed dingleberry with two good fingers can use a hand grenade and rely on the writers to get him out of a jam, but it takes a hard-nosed, borderline alcoholic, rough and tumble, mustache baring s.o.b. to stomp out an alien invasion with a handgun, a Zippo, and a can of AquaNet, motherfucker!
First things first, the movie’s not bad. Obviously Gunn’s a fan of good movies (not actual “good” movies, but the kind of shit that gets five stars around here) and he’s not afraid to whip it out, no matter what giggling Catholic school girls may be nearby to point and laugh. His direction is good, though not wholly original. Hey, if you’re gonna borrow, what better way than to borrow from your heroes, right? Character wise, you feel sorry for Grant for much of the movie. Sure, he’s a little “over protective” of his wife (who does the “Laurie Strode” stereotype of going from mousey to femme fatale in less time than it takes to order Chinese food), but as an older guy going through his mid-life crisis of self-doubt, afraid that his hot younger wife could leave him at any minute for a stud her own age. He doesn’t seem to get abusive to Starla in any way, he just wanders off to get drink and flirt with cheap cooze when she doesn’t put out. Even then he won’t go all the way and cheat on his wife, cuz he actually loves her, damn it! This just makes it all the more depressing to watch the guy suffer and struggle with his infestation. Sure, the undying hunger for meat and his insistence on sleeping on a pile of leaves in the basement is amusing, but it’s hard to watch him fight off the alien urge to sacrifice the little lady to his hunger, cuz you know the guy cares so much about her… something that’s completely ruined later on thanks to a few harsh words and revealing atrocities he has for Starla once he’s started merging flesh with his victims and turns into a mass of tendrils and shouting redneck faces. It’s sad that the emotional investment had to be killed off in favor of making us want to see the guy die…
Otherwise, the gore is good when it’s monster makeup and fake blood, but a lot of the computer generated stuff was hit or miss. Some of it was good, some of it was too fake to sit through with a strait face, and the rest was pointless stuff that could’ve easily been done with a slimy prosthetic here and there. I understand much of the use for the pixilated slug beasties, but a part of me was hoping for a little more intuition, like the folks we knew and loved from the ‘80s, especially with the obvious comparison to the bang up work from Night of the Creeps.
A good movie that borders on great. If you haven’t seen it already, try to catch it on cable, give it a Friday night rental, or just bump it up your NetFlix/Blockbuster queue. Not to the top mind you, but I’d say somewhere in the top twelve.
Oh yeah, P.S. to all this, as with Dawn of the Dead, Gunn writes in a little “after the credits” bonus to lock in a sequel in case anyone’s interested in investing in it. Shouldn’t be hard considering the money this one made…
