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Tuesday 11 October 2011

Burl reviews Slugs: The Movie! (1987)


Hi, Burl here with a pretty gross movie to review! Slugs: The Movie still isn’t the grossest Juan Piquer Simon movie though – that title would have to go to Pieces! I’ll review that one sometime soon, rest assured my friends!

But now let’s look at Slugs! Ew, right? Ugly little guys! It seems that the town of Ashton, somewhere on the border between New York State and the Spanish province of Castile la Mancha, has an invertebrate problem – a bunch of toxic waste everybody forgot about has caused mutations in the local slugs, and they’ve grown little Muppet mouths filled with tiny vampire teeth! Oh, and an insatiable lust for meat!

A few citizens are filleted by the critters, and then Mike, the public health guy, becomes concerned! He joins forces with the town sewer-meister, who has an elderly wife, and a nerdy Spanish/British scientist, and they spend the rest of the movie trying to figure out how to outdo the slugs in property damage and casualties! They get it sorted in the last few minutes of the movie, blowing half the town to flinders with their efforts! Also, one of them gets slugged, and in the end they don’t even manage to get rid of all the slimy pests! Ha ha, some heroes!

Mike simply isn’t the swiftest boat in the fleet! He spends much of the movie trying to persuade the officials to turn off the water so the slugs can’t bite people on the bum by coming up out of their toilets, and they’re with him as long as he’s talking about contamination, but once he gets to the slug part, they laugh at him and declare him a loony! “You don’t have the authority to declare happy birthday,” he’s told! Hey Mike, why not just say it’s contaminated and leave it at that? You might get results that way, or at least be allowed to declare happy birthday! Mike also has a strangely halting, emphatic way of speaking that doesn’t help his powers of persuasion!

But between all these scenes are some pretty tasty slug attacks! An old guy gets one in his gardening glove, then for some reason can’t get it off when the slug starts biting! To fix his gastropod problem he ends up having to blow himself and his wife up in a spectacular greenhouse conflagration! Ha ha, he and Mike are just peas in a pod I guess! Explains why he liked that old couple so much!

There’s also a young couple, quite an objectionable pair actually, who make sweet love and then find out the hard way that their bed is surrounded by slugs! Ha ha, that one gets pretty gruesome! Another slug attack is less direct: a guy eats some of them chopped up in a salad prepared by his drunken, oblivious wife, and then the next day his head explodes as veteran actress Silvana Magnano, of Dune, watches from the corner! Ha ha!

Altogether this is a pretty enjoyable exercise in gruetology! It’s certainly not of a very high quality, but it’s compelling and goofy and fairly fast-paced, and it delivers the goods! I give it two and a half banging toilet lids!

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