This humorous horror outing has moments of wit, but often mistakes curse words with subversive satire. As horror the film is more creepy rather than scary. As a comedy, it's more of a gross out chuckler than a dark satirical howler. Some of the grosser moments are neither scary, creepy nor funny… just plain sickening.
Bill Pardy (Nathan Fillion, SERENITY) is a small town police chief, who still has a flame for his childhood sweetheart Starla Grant (Elizabeth Banks, THE 40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN), who is married to the older Grant Grant (Michael Rooker, HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER), the richest man in town. When Starla shuns Grant's sexual advances, he heads out to a bar where he meets a woman. Their foray into the forest results in Grant being possessed by an alien entity that wants to devour all living things on Earth.
The first thing lodged in my memory about the film is the grotesque aliens. Grant starts by forming a forked, horn-tipped appendage from his chest then develops oozing sores on his face eventually turning into a giant slug-like, squid-like creature reminiscent of the deformed human abomination from John Carpenter's THE THING. Then there's a woman that swells to the size of a barn. And finally we get large red slugs that jump into people's mouths and turn them into zombies. The slugs are straight out of the awful 1986 horror flick, NIGHT OF THE CREEPS.
Too many of the gross moments fall short of their intended goals, which is either to scare or make one laugh. However, laughs outweigh the scares by a large margin. This is mainly due to a good performance from Banks, whose reactions to her husband's worsening condition and her strategy to deal with him when he goes on a rampage are the highlights of the film. Another highlight of the film is Fillion. I liked him in SERENITY and he's equally charming here. He has a great knack for his kind of tongue-in-cheek genre humor.
Another funny performance comes from Gregg Henry (UNITED 93) as the foul-mouthed mayor Jack MacReady. Henry commits himself to the scenery chewing performance for good or for worse. The worse comes in the form of curse words used a punch lines with no wit attached to them. His inappropriate comments are funny at first, but loose their effect quickly. The film also looses a purpose for him toward the end. The resolution of this problem is funny, but just underlines his pointlessness to the story outside of comic relief. Likewise can be said about the teenager Kylie (Tania Saulnier, THE INVISIBLE), who is attacked by the slugs in the tub. She is strictly a convenient plot device.
The film works best when dealing with Bill, Starla and Grant. The plot actually avoids typical love triangle clichés, especially when it comes to the older man married to younger woman issues. It's an interesting move, yet it leaves all the dramatic tension for the alien issue. The hit or miss nature of the humor and the mostly one-dimensional plot engine make the film less than satisfying in the end, especially with a resolution that played in a way that feels like a cheat.
For fans of funny horror, this film is by far worth a watch. It has enough laughs to be entertaining for that audience, but not enough else working for it to cross over to the general public. It's brief reference to Troma Films seals its intended audience and outside of a more polished look and better acting doesn't do much to lift itself above its trashy inspirations.
Rick DeMott
Animation World Network
Creator of Rick's Flicks Picks
