Horrorfest 2021: Slugs: The Movie

Slugs: The Movie (1988)
Written by Ron Gantman and Juan Piquer Simon
Based on the book by Shaun Hutson
Directed by Juan Piquer Simon
Starring Michael Garfield and Kim Terry
USA/Spain

Every year (except last year – pandemic!) the Hollywood Theater down the street holds an all-night horror movie marathon in honor of Halloween. I’ve attended twice, and I attended this year. It’s a fun event where you don’t know which four movies are going to be shown, and you get more and more delirious as your sleep deprived night goes on. Even if the movies are terrible, it’s still fun. This year, three out of the four movies were movies I had never seen before, so I was able to include them in Horrorfest. SLUGS: THE MOVIE is the first one.

Positioned as a JAWS clone, only with slugs instead of sharks, SLUGS unfolds how you might expect – people are dying, no one knows why, the health inspector figures it’s slugs, the authorities thing he’s crazy, he puts together a team to hunt down and destroy the slugs once and for all, credits.

So, the movie is objectively not good, however it is never dull and has a lot of gross out moments as well as unintentionally funny moments. Also, for the most part, the special effects are pretty great.

It’s one of those movies that you begin to expect might have been made by aliens – there’s lots of scenes of humans in seemingly normal social situations, but the way the dialogue goes and the scenes develop, it plays as if it’s someone’s approximation of what they think humans might do, as opposed to something a human who has been around other humans might write and direct.

My favorite part was the overly enthusiastic score. It’s actually a pretty good score, by the standards of the time, especially for a B-movie. But it’s employed in such an odd way. Most of the suspenseful and action packed music cues end up getting used in the endless filler footage of cars either arriving places and parking, or departing places. The juxtaposition of an orchestra going full throttle while someone carefully parks their car is comedy gold.