Slugs (1988) New World/Horror RT: 89 minutes Rated R (violence, gore, language, nudity, sex) Director: Juan Piquer Simon Screenplay: Ron Gantman Music: Tim Souster Cinematography: Julio Bragado Release date: February 5, 1988 (US) Cast: Michael Garfield, Kim Terry, Philip MacHale, Alicia Moro, Santiago Alvarez, Concha Cuetos, John Battaglia, Emilio Linder, Kris Mann, Kari Rose, Manuel de Blas, Andy Alsup, Stan Schwartz, Juan Majan, Patty Shepard, Miguel de Grandy, Tammy Reger, Glen Greenberg, Jay R. Ingerson. Box Office: $15,842 (US)
Rating: ***
Since the “stay at home” policy has been in effect, I’ve watched horror movies dealing with spiders and snakes. Where do I go from here? To a low budget creature feature called Slugs, of course. In it, killer slugs attack a rural town. What’s that you say, killer slugs? Let me explain. It’s a well-known fact that slugs are herbivores; they mainly eat leaves from living plants. Not these slugs! Due to exposure to toxic waste, they mutated into carnivores that feed on humans. Only one man can stop them… Mike Brady. No, not that Mike Brady.
This particular Mr. Brady (played by Michael Garfield) is the town health inspector. He first realizes something’s wrong when he and the sheriff (Battaglia) go to evict the town drunk (Schwartz, Bedroom Eyes II) from his filthy home only to find the guy dead, partially devoured and covered with slime. Other mysterious deaths follow, all with tell-tale signs of slimy slug trails. He brings a few slugs he finds in his wife Kim’s (Terry) garden to the high school science teacher, Foley (Alvarez), who witnesses their unusual dietary habits first-hand when one of them eats his guinea pig. Mike tries to warn the town officials about the deadly creatures, but none of them believe him (naturally). In the end, it’s up to fearless Mike Brady to stop them with the help of his best bud Don (MacHale), the head of the town’s sanitation department.
You pretty much know what you’re in for when you commit to watch a movie entitled Slugs. It has slugs, A LOT OF THEM! They’re all over the place; basements, kitchens, greenhouses, sewers, toilets, the woods and the town’s water supply. They even come out of the faucets. They kill people, quite a few and quite messily. This movie doesn’t skimp on the blood, slime and goo. It gives us shots of partially consumed corpses with the eyes eaten right out of the sockets. The centerpiece gross-out moment is the scene where parasitic worms burst out of a guy’s head in a restaurant after he unknowingly ingests a slug-laced salad. Of course, the dimwitted sheriff attributes it to food poisoning. If there’s ever a movie that should come with a free barf bag, it’s Slugs.
Directed by Juan Piquer Simon (Pieces), Slugs is as deliciously campy as it is nauseating. It’s a Spanish-American co-production meaning there’s a fair amount of English dubbing. For a change, it’s actually pretty good on a technical level. The spoken dialogue is a fairly close match to the Spanish actors’ lip movements. The problem is the stiff line readings. Much of the dialogue is delivered in a stilted manner that suggests no attempt was made to polish it in translation. Acting definitely is not the movie’s strong suit, but did you really expect otherwise? A lot of it is stiff, especially Garfield who barely registers on the emotional scale. When told of his friend’s horrific death in the restaurant, you’d think that somebody merely told him he left his lights on in the parking lot.
The movie’s strongest suit is the special effects work which won a Goya Award for the team of Basilio Cortijo, Gonzalo Gonzalo and Carlo De Marchis. They go at Slugs full tilt boogie bringing their A-game to this enjoyable B-movie. There’s one cool scene where a man chops off his own hand with a hatchet after slugs crawl into his gardening glove. Lots of blood spurt here! That’s not all. Where most B-movie filmmakers would use rubber slugs, these guys use real ones, big black ones, many of them. The screen crawls with them in some scenes. They’re strong too. Not only can they drag the bodies of their victims, they even manage to grab a shovel right out of a man’s hand. Hey, I never said Slugs was realistic.
The screenplay by Ron Gantman isn’t exactly A-level writing. A subplot involving teens throwing an ill-advised outdoor Halloween party is underdeveloped. None of them are even significant characters unless you count the young couple killed by slugs while having sex. A plot thread about a character’s wife’s alcoholism is dropped almost immediately after it’s brought up.
It also expects the viewer to stretch credulity beyond the limit. Are we really supposed to believe the science teacher can mix up 50 gallons worth of an explosive lithium compound in a matter of hours? The plan to kill the slugs depends on all of them being in one spot at the same time. Yeah, like that’s gonna happen. Again, what did you expect? It’s a movie about killer mutant slugs, it’s not freaking Citizen Kane. It does have some great bad dialogue though. Here are a couple of samples:
Mike: “Now maybe, just maybe, we’re dealing with a mutant form of slug here, a kind that eats meat!”
Sheriff: “What’ll it be next, demented crickets? Rampaging mosquitoes, maybe?”
There’s more, but I’ll leave it to you to discover. That’s my subtle way of recommending Slugs, a surprisingly effective low budget creature feature released by New World Pictures in the US. I don’t recall it playing in theaters; I know it didn’t open in Philly. I remember it being in video stores, but I didn’t bother with it. If there’s an upside to the COVID-19 crisis, it’s that it allows me the opportunity to catch up on older movies I haven’t seen. Slugs is one of the better ones.
