Slither

[bonanzataz]

Slither
written and directed by James Gunn (Dawn of the Dead, Tromeo and Juliet)
in theaters march 31, 2006

OLD TRAILER: www.alldumb.com/item/13437/
NEW TRAILER: http://www.apple.com/trailers/universal/slither/

i've been looking forward to this for a while. i think either he was making this knowing universal was going to distribute it (seeing as how they produced dawn of the dead) or they just picked it up for distribution recently. this new trailer is a bit hollywoodized and not as funny as the older one, but at least you can dl it in hd. anyway, stills from bloodydisgusting look awesome.

http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/film/561

should be good for gore and horror-comedy fans. for everybody else, well...

[Reinhold]

apparently, Universal didn't like the trailer either. They're holding a trailer contest with a $25,000 prize.

http://www.slithermovie.net/slugitout/index.php

[modage]

Exclusive: Slither Director James Gunn
Source: ComingSoon.net

Like all but the most diehard of movie and television geeks, the first time I heard the name James Gunn was when I was checking out the credits on the remake of Dawn of the Dead to see who instilled such great humor in with all of the zombie madness. Surprisingly, the movie was written by the same guy who did the "Scooby-Doo" movies for Warner Bros, and the latter's sequel opened a week after the former, both at #1, an amazing achievement that showed a highly creative mind at work.

A lot of that creativity probably goes back to Gunn's tenure at Lloyd Kaufman's Troma Studios, famous for such B-movie classics as The Toxic Avenger and Gunn's first screenplay Tromeo and Juliet. Years later, he's in Hollywood and considered one of the town's hottest writer, and if that weren't enough, the lucky bastard is married to Jenna Fischer, who may as well be America's sweetheart from playing the receptionist Pam on the NBC show The Office.

Next week, Gunn's feature debut as director, the horror film Slither hits theatres with its premise of a bacteria that infects a small town. I didn't get to see the movie before talking to James, but he certainly made me want to see it more after talking to him.

ComingSoon.net: Could you sum up the movie quickly for those who haven't seen it yet, like me?
James Gunn: I can try. It's a story of a small town, and a man by the name of Grant Grant, played by Michael Rooker, who gets infected by an alien plague, which then travels from him to many of the other people in the town and affects them in myriad different ways. I think it's really a return to the old school over-the-top gory fun humorous horror movies of the 1980's, and I wanted to do something that was different than other movies that were out there in the marketplace.

CS: From watching the trailer, it looked like you're going a bit towards the horror movies of the '50s or '60s even...
Gunn: I do have a little bit of that in there, too. The movie that inspired me from the '50s was "The Blob," so I have some of that in there, but really, it's movies like "Re-Animator" and "Basket Case" and "The Fly" and "The Thing" and "Tremors" and all of these great, fun movies from the '80s. Those were really my main influences.

CS: As far as "Slither," did you always write it intending to direct it yourself?
Gunn: No, I didn't actually. When I originally wrote it, I was originally attached to direct another very low budget black comedy, and I wrote "Slither" and I was going to sell it and make a little money, because I wasn't going to make any money from this other movie. After I wrote it and after I sold it to Gold Circle, I did rewrites, and I started to really fall in love with the script. I started to see how this movie was very much about me and the way I saw the world and [it] a tone that I felt, which is a combination of very horrific, and also very humorous. And I didn't think it was something that would be translated well by another director, so I talked to Paul about it—and he had been pushing me to direct anyway—so I decided to jump ship from one movie to the other, and I did this one.

CS: What was the other movie you were thinking of doing?
Gunn: It's a movie called "Super." It's a script I love and still one of my favorite scripts of all time, but it was a little bit slower getting it moving. It's a little more of a risky venture than a horror movie. I had the opportunity of something in my face that I was able to do immediately versus something that was a little bit of a maybe to it.

CS: Did you have a little bit more cred at Universal to direct the film after the success of "Dawn of the Dead"?
Gunn: I had cred specifically because those two movies opened up back to back #1. I had a sort of golden sheath around me for a period of a few months, and I knew I needed to take that opportunity to be able to direct, so people were comfortable with me doing that. Frankly, even though I'm a first-time director, I've been around the sets of films for a long time, and I was very comfortable working around studio films. I've been around a lot of movies, so it was just a very comfortable shift.

CS: Let's talk about the casting of Nathan Fillion as the town's sherrif. Are you a "Serenity" fan?
Gunn: I was a "Firefly" fan actually. We shot the movie before "Serenity" came out, and I knew Joss, because he actually gave me my first job in Hollywood, creating a TV pilot. I knew Joss was really careful with who he chose to do his later TV shows. He had some problems with people on his earlier TV shows, so he really wanted to put together a cast with "Firefly" of people he loved, and all the people on that show are terrific. I needed somebody who was both perfect for the role, which Nathan was, who was able to be a hero, but also was very humorous, which Nathan is, and I needed somebody who was able to put up with a really rigorous, hard shoot, and still be a trooper. I knew because Joss had worked with him that Nathan was that was well. He's a real positive energy to have on set, and just really energized the whole cast and crew. He's a great friend and I couldn't be happier with him in the movie.

CS: What about Elizabeth Banks, who's also a very funny actress? In the trailer, we see her kissing her deformed husband. Did she know that she'd be doing that when she took the job?
Gunn: Oh, yeah. We stuck very closely to the script, and she knew from the beginning what kind of script it was. One of the things I love about Elizabeth is that she's beautiful and elegant looking and you think she's very classy, but she has this very sick sense of humor, and she really got "Slither" from the beginning. She got the humor, which I really appreciated, and most importantly, she was exactly what I was looking for in an actress. I really wanted a throwback almost to the Hitchcock leading lady, someone who was like Grace Kelly or Tippi Hedren. Elizabeth is such a classic beauty and able to do such crude things simultaneously that she is the perfect actress for "Slither." I thought it was going to be very hard to find somebody to do that role, and she was actually one of the first people we found.

CS: Who did the make-up effects for the movie?
Gunn: Monica Hupper was our actual make-up person, and she did a lot of the basic diseased make-up and so forth, but the guy who did our prosthetics and creature design, that make-up stuff, was a guy by the name of Todd Masters, who just did wonderful work. He's a true artist.

CS: So how did you work with him as far as designing that amazing make-up job on Michael Rooker?
Gunn: Usually, we'd start with me doing a very, very bad sketch, which in turn Todd would re-sketch in a beautiful drawing, and that I'd give notes on, and we'd just go back and forth on sketches. Once we had the sketch kind of where we wanted, then we'd move onto the macquette stage and then he'd sculpt the creature and then we'd got back and forth until we had exactly what we wanted. Then we would get that where wanted to be, and that's what we designed the creature around.

CS: Were you basing those ideas on anything in particular, like nightmares you've had?
Gunn: Well, the look of Grant Grant, I think it's just a combination of function and artistry. I think we needed to have something where we could see the creature's eyes, because Michael Rooker actually does a lot of acting through that make-up. Then other things like the Brenda Womb, the big fat woman, she's an image I had in my head when I first started writing the script, and Todd frankly had a lot of trouble doing what I wanted, because she almost defies gravity. He saw her being very different, but I'm like, "Nope, just this bit round orb with a head on the front and little tiny gross fingers on the side. That's all she is." And eventually he got there. I drew her early on, and she looks exactly like what I drew in the very beginning.

CS: Were you doing a lot of the creatures practically on set or did you do a lot of the parasites with CGI?
Gunn: We have some practical parasites and some CGI parasites. At one point, the Brenda Womb explodes and out come 27,000 living parasites--it's pretty gross--you cannot practically do 27,000 worms. It just doesn't work. They can't move. You'd need 27,000 puppeteers, which isn't going to work, so those are all CGI. We had a mix of practical and CGI effects. Most of the effects are practical. I wanted to stick to that old school, grimy down-home effects that although it might not look totally real all the time, it's always interesting. I started using prosthetic effects whenever possible, and then in some things, like with those parasites and with long tentacles, I used CGI.

CS: These days, horror is all about remaking movies from the '70s and '80s and modernizing them, but this one is more about being retro. Do you think kids today will get that?
Gunn: Oh, yeah. It's not really about being retro, it's about being fun, and I think anybody can relate to that. It's about being fun, and about going to extremes, and about grossing people out and being creepy. The movie's about all those things, not about being retro. It's about recapturing some of those feelings that horror movies used to express, and they just don't express anymore.

CS: You created a bit of cinema history by writing back-to-back #1 movies with "Dawn of the Dead" and "Scooby-Doo 2." How are you able to switch gears like that to write those two very different movies?
Gunn: I think being a schizophrenic helps. Oh, I don't know. I mean, "Dawn of the Dead" was a movie I wrote for me; "Scooby-Doo" was a movie I wrote for children. It's just a matter of thinking of who the audience you're speaking to is. When you tell a story at a party to your friends, and it's probably riddled with curse words and crazy and tell it one type of way, and if you're telling a story to little children, you tell it in a different way. So I think it's just a matter of where I'm aiming the story.


CS: Going back a bit, did you learn anything from your time at Troma and from Lloyd Kaufman that you've been able to apply to making this movie?
Gunn: Listen, the truth is that I got hired by Troma without going to film school and got offered 150 bucks to write this movie ("Tromeo and Juliet") and then I was able to learn every single thing about making movies practically through that experience. I was able to learn what it was like to scout for locations, what it was like to cast a movie, to work on the special effects, and then what it was like to actually produce the film, to deal with the actors and camera angles, and then, what it was like in post-production, to edit the film, to put it out into theatres, to deal with the MPAA. So through Troma, I was able to have a very wide education about filmmaking and to me, that was invaluable experience. It's almost like Troma is a very small version of a studio. They are a studio. You have to deal with all the same problems you have to deal with Universal or Warner Bros. or anybody else, it's just on a smaller scale.

CS: It must be nice to at least have a bigger budget now...
Gunn: (laughs) A little bit of a bigger budget. Lloyd was like, "How many Tromeo and Juliets [was the budget]?" and I'm like, "About 40."

CS: Still, I assumed that it's easier to know how to use the money you have to get what you need without worrying so much based on that experience?
Gunn: Well, that's also true. You know, it's really important to be cost-conscious, whether you're making a movie for $300,000 or for $200 million dollars. You still need to watch what you're spending money on, because you want every dollar to show up on screen. That's our job as filmmakers, is to make every dollar go towards what you see on screen, so that the end product is the most exciting and fun it can possibly be. I really tried to do that with this movie, and we spent the money appropriately. We got a lot for our dollar. It was like squeezing water from a rock, at times, with some of our special effects, but we did it, and we pulled it off, so I'm really pleased.

CS: I hear you're a big comic book fan, too, something you also have in common with Joss. Are there any comic books that you'd want to try to adapt or direct or are you really trying to do your own thing?
Gunn: Right now, I'm looking to do my own original thing, but man, there are some great comics out there. There's some great stuff. In fact, there are a couple comic artists that were influential to "Slither." The first was Junji Ito, who did a comic series called "Uzumaki" and that really inspired me. It was kind of what spun me off into "Slither" when I read that. Another one is an artist/writer named Renee French, and she's fantastic. We've actually struck up a friendship through all of this stuff, and I would send her pictures of all the drawings I've done for this movie, and she'd send me comments and tell me what she thought. She was really helpful in putting this film together, because she loves body horror just like I do. She loves the idea of these parasites living off of human beings and has all these same obsessions that I have.

CS: This is kind of a weird segue, but I saw your wife Jenna Fischer's movie Lollilove. Are you really as big a germaphobe as you portray yourself in her movie?
Gunn: (laughs) No! I'm a little bit of a germaphobe, but nothing like that.

CS: And you got to direct her in your movie, too. So did you get payback for anything she made you do in "Lollilove"?
Gunn: No, no, no. Actually, she didn't deserve it. I'm terrible to direct, because I do whatever I want, and that's what I'm like with her, and then she came on my movie and she did what I wanted. So it was much more comfortable directing her I think than her directing me, because I tend to be a handful. She says I'm a diva. Who knows?

CS: She mentions that in the extras on the DVD, but I thought maybe those were fake, too, because they were just as funny as the actual movie.
Gunn: (laughs) That stuff, the extras, are all real, but the movie's fake.

CS: Do you have any idea what you might be doing next and do you have another script ready to direct once this one is done?
Gunn: I'm writing a screenplay about Satan! I think that we need to examine this guy a little bit more and see what makes him tick and what makes him so pissed off at all of us, and so I'm dealing with that right now.

CS: So it's going to be like an inverse of "The Passion of The Christ"?
Gunn: Did you say an inverse "Passion of The Christ"? That's a good idea... I'm going to steal that! I'm sorry! "An Inverse Passion of The Christ...the opposing view." (laughs)

I guess we can forgive James for stealing my idea if it helps get his next crazy movie financed. In the meantime, I'll be there early Friday morning on March 31 to see his latest horror flick, Slither.

[squints]

Exclusive: Slither Director James Gunn
I didn't get to see the movie before talking to James, but he certainly made me want to see it more after talking to him.

I stopped reading at this point.

[MacGuffin]

James Gunn Talks Slither Aftermath, Plus What's Next     

James Gunn is recovering nicely from the disappointing release of his directorial debut Slither. Despite a lackluster box office, Gunn faced a press line, all smiles and happy to spill about the next script he is writing for himself to direct. Tentatively titled Scratch, the film deals with some of Gunn's favorite subjects.

"Well, it's a horror movie but it's about evil within a family," Gunn says. "It has a little bit to do with Satan and I'm just dealing with it right now. I love creepy kids and I love bad pregnancies. Those are my two favorite things so this one has both in spades."

Gunn is branching out from his previous horror movies. Instead of deriving influence from his favorite subgenres, he is creating his own. "Really I just had this idea in my head. It wasn't the same as with Dawn of the Dead. There's something about the movies of the '70s that I really wanted to get the grit [of]. ... With Slither I really wanted to bring back the fun of the movies of the '80s and with this new thing, it's just sort of its own thing. I don't like too many horror movies from the '90s so I don't really want to play with that. ...It's just its own thing."

There is currently no studio attached to Scratch. "I'm just writing it. I'm doing exactly what I did the last couple times, which is write it and then go out. Because the thing is I like making movies. I like going out and getting them made. What happens when you get attached to a studio beforehand, you can end up in development hell. This one I can go out to all the studios and whoever wants to make the movie, that's who I'll go with."

That's not to say that Universal will turn their backs on the man who gave them Dawn of the Dead just because of Slither's unfortunate fate. "They want me to do something. They keep trying to get me to do something but I want to finish the movie so that it's completely my baby and it's not tainted by somebody else's ideas. And I hate telling other people what my movie is about beforehand because then they start to get ideas of what it should be at the end. Even this script, this script started as something totally different and where it's ending up is its own thing and it's completely different from what I started writing. So if I had sold it to a studio to begin with, they would have had their ideas about what it was supposed to be and then I would have been stuck to that."

Slither received glowing reviews, especially from the horror community who got all the little inside jokes. Gunn feels it was his cross of genres that put off the general public. "I think it really is a mixed genre film first of all, and that is hard for the American people to understand. I think that it's something that when people are in the theater they seem to love it, but to get them into the theater, I think it's difficult. They get confused on the outside of the movie. Why that is, I don't know. Why people can be kind of simple like that, I don't know, but I think that's a large part of it."

So if you like mixed genre films, you and Gunn must be alone. "Yeah, I think we are. Now I think if you can trick 'em and they think they're going to see a horror movie, then they're inside the theater and they're happy. But to sell it honestly I think you have a real difficult time on your hand. And we knew it was coming with Slither. I saw the list of the biggest grossing horror comedies of all time and we're talking the biggest grossing ones are like $21 million. Like Cabin Fever was a horror comedy but they sold it as a horror movie. So it is difficult. But at the same time, I'm so gratified that people like the movie and I really did just set out to make a movie that people liked. And that seems to have worked so I'm happy."

[Weak2ndAct]

Wow, did anyone see this?  This thread is all articles.  Anyway, like the rest of America, I skipped the flick in theatres, but just watched the disc.  Yeah, it's a snoozer. 

List of offenses:
- Everyone speaking in lazy 'rural' accents-- it destroys Gregg Henry's dialogue, dude could be way funnier.
- Tubgirl from the poster and ads just shows up and takes over the movie.  Decent scene, just who the fuck is this girl and why do I care?
- Too many jokes at the expense of the country-folk.  Feels snide.
- The lack of any kind of ending.
- It's weird, while I appreciated the different 'monster,' it was kind of a letdown to basically see the people basically turn into zombies-- who talk.
- Takes too long to get to the action, like 30 mins.

I feel like I'm really dissing on the flick-- it's not awful or anything close-- but I think a flick like this *should* have been good, and I appreciate the fact that I was not watching a dead teenager/ghost/jigsaw movie, but something more akin to 'The Thing.'  Though there was not one scare scene even close in craziness to Carpenter's movie.

[modage]

i agree. http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=1274.msg234887#msg234887  i wanted this to be great so much that i felt guilty for writing a mixed review. 

[grand theft sparrow]

Chalk another one up for "it should have been really good."  I expected it to be about what it was but after watching the whole thing, I realized that if it had the balls to be scary instead of just creepy and gross, it could have been legendary.

It was fun, certainly moreso than Hostel or Saw or the torture porn that's been hot these days.  It lifted a lot from Night of the Creeps (so much so that they should have done what they did with the Dawn of the Dead remake and force them to call it a remake) but the sense of humor reminded me more of Tremors, neither of which I've seen in at least 15 years but enjoyed them when I was younger.  But since this doesn't add anything new to either one of those movies besides gore, nor was it scary in the least, I don't think I'll ever watch it again, unless there's nothing else on and I'm in a limbo where I'm too lazy or drunk to get up and put on a DVD and too energetic or sober to pass out.