Slither (live action movie), via Netflix

Slither is a horror comedy. I think. Netflix's tagging says nothing about it being darkly humorous, but I couldn't help but view parts of it that way.

I don't even know why I added this to my Netflix queue, but I did. I don't usually watch horror movies, and, when I do, I don't watch them alone because I'm a wimp. I bumped this up in my queue when I realized it starred Nathan Fillion.

Here's the story: An alien thing crash lands near a small town. Something nasty shoots out of it, crawls into the body of a guy named Grant, and starts taking him over. Grant now has a driving need to breed and to eat fresh meat. He loves his wife (when he isn't consumed with jealousy and basically calling her a whore), so he tries to hide his new needs from her. This becomes harder when the alien parasite inside him begins transforming his body into that of a horrible mutated monster. The local cops, one of whom (Nathan Fillion) has been nursing an unrequited love for Grant's wife, try to hunt down and kill Grant. This is made difficult by Grant's new killing abilities and the many, many parasitic slugs Grant has grown inside one of the local women.

This movie is nasty. Thankfully for my piece of mind, a lot of the nastiness is kind of fake-looking. While this doesn't make things less nasty, at least I wasn't left feeling afraid to enter my own bathroom. As you can probably tell from the "cover" artwork, this movie follows the usual pattern of sexualizing horror. The slugs are penis-like and try to enter via people's mouths (thankfully only their mouths). There are tentacles. There is indeed a bathroom scene in which a naked girl is unaware that a bunch of penis-slugs are about to attack her. The explanation for why beautiful Starla married homely Grant was paper-thin, especially when you consider the way he treated her whenever she didn't show the proper level of devotion. (She was pretty dumb, though, so maybe that makes their marriage more believable?) However, her marriage to Grant and his "love" for her meant that there were of course scenes in which she tried to convince him (at least once while wearing something sexy) that she still loved him, and could he therefore not kill her and also stop killing and/or absorbing everyone else?

Sadly, Nathan Fillion wasn't able to save this movie for me. It was mediocre, and nothing he could do could help that. However, I absolutely loved his expression of stunned horror when he dropped the grenade he intended to use to kill Grant.

Those who love animals, beware: there are lots and lots of dead animals in this movie (I recall them looking pretty fake, though). A dog dies, albeit off-screen. A cat dies, also off-screen. Nathan Fillion is attacked by a zombie deer, although the scene was so dark I didn't realize what had happened until later.

All in all, I expected this to be a mediocre movie, and it was. Nathan Fillion was probably the best reason to watch it, and he wasn't given much material with which to shine.