The film opens with a meteor breaking apart as it enters the Earth’s atmosphere and crashing into the tranquil village of Wheelsy. A hostile parasite extraterrestrial emerges from this rock, infecting Michael Rooker’s Grant. James Gunn undoubtedly neglected to name his monster in his directorial debut, but because of its capacity to assemble and merge with its victims, fans have dubbed it the Long One.
The Long One is a sentient and sapient entity that has lived in the cosmos from the beginning of time, with the primary goal of consuming whole planets by fusing with their biomass. It starts off as a hairy needle-like organism that infects a primary host. The host impregnates a female, who serves as a womb for slug-like larvae.
These slugs then enter other organisms through their mouth and take control of the brain. All the secondary hosts get consumed and assimilated into the primary host and begin to form one monstrous blob of immovable flesh with tentacles growing everywhere. James Gunn’s mind is a scary place to be in because he makes sure that you don’t resist the horror because of the connection he builds with you.
In this horror comedy, the charm of Slither rests in the gracious and effective use of special and visual effects. The monster appears astoundingly terrible, horrifying, and horrific, but you won’t be able to take your gaze away from it. The Long One resembles terrestrial snails and slugs uncannily.
It fires a needle into the host in its original shape, similar to the love dart used by a few slugs and snails to inject hormones and reproductive materials into females. Furthermore, like slugs, the Long One is a hermaphrodite, meaning it can reproduce asexually without a mate.
However, it needs a female to serve as a womb or an incubator. It stabs two tentacles into the womb’s abdomen: while one injects the ovum, the other injects the sperm. After the gestation period is over, the womb explodes, and the cute little slug babies are born.
Slither did not fare well at the box office, despite receiving several honours and critical acclaim. Naturally, Marvelous Videos felt it was our responsibility to bring this masterpiece of a film to light and provide it the respect and love it deserved. So, without further delay, let’s have a look at how things move around.
The picture begins with a meteorite hurtling towards Earth at breakneck speed, and we can hear the celestial object’s rumbling as it approaches our planet. Two policemen, police chief Bill and junior officer Wally, are on night patrol on the planet.
The meteorite lands in the woods behind them, with its outside surface consisting of stony material and its inside section made of a soft, crimson, and squishy substance. It’s a mix between a coconut and a watermelon, in some ways. Don’t pass judgement on us; we’re only presenting the facts!
Next, we are given a slight tour of the town only with the intent of letting the viewers get accustomed to a few plot points and showing Gunn’s respect for other horror films. One of the billboards tells us that a deer hunting festival is around the corner.
And one of the hoardings has the words R. J. MacReady Auctioneers and Funeral Homes. If you may remember, Kurt Russell’s character in John Carpenter’s 1982 The Thing was named R. J. MacReady. However, in this movie, there’s not going to be any shape shifting aliens, well… at least not one that creates a sense of claustrophobia and paranoia.
Moving ahead, we encounter a number of the town’s residents, each of whom is unusual and unique in their own way. The cigarette-smoking sarcastic priest, on the other hand, is still our fave. Interestingly, almost all of these random-looking people are going to feature later in the film, though maybe not in the way you’d expect them to.
Then we’re introduced to Starla Grant’s biology class, where she’s a schoolteacher with an old-fashioned elegance and the looks of a Hitchcockian blonde girl. She’s explaining Darwin’s principle of survival of the fittest to the class, and she doesn’t mind calling cockroaches fitter than humans.
Starla is seen interacting with Environmental Studies Teacher Hank, who is played by none other than Gunn himself, after the course. Starla and Hank are interrupted by her husband, Grant Grant, played by Michael Rooker; yes, the man has the same first and last names.
The next thing we discover is that Starla and Grant married because he stood by her when she was young and defenceless. Her mother left her when she was just 17, probably because of her drunkard father. When Grant came along and offered to help her with her education, she couldn’t say no to him, and ultimately, the two of them got married.
Having grown up in shanties, she was living her dream of being a respected lady. Bill’s colleague Margaret is depicted as a lesbian, as Bill says if Grant were a woman having a ‘gina,’ she would have married him too.
Grant tries to make love to his lovely Starla later that night, but she refuses his overtures, stating she isn’t in the mood. We might have concluded Margaret was simply not in the mood if we hadn’t heard Bill and Margaret’s talk; nevertheless, this appears to be far from the case.
Grant becomes angry as a result of the continual rejection of his movements and leaves the house to visit a neighbourhood tavern. There he chanced upon a lady named Brenda Montgomery, the sister of Grant’s one-time ex, Megan Montgomery.
They get drunk and go to the nearby woods, where they end up kissing. However, Grant says that Starla would get anxious if he didn’t reach home early. Naturally, this pisses off poor Brenda, who was hoping to get some action in the woods that were lovely, dark, and deep.
Grant finds a sticky white shell of some creature just before he departs and follows the trail with Brenda. They find a whitish gelatinous sac that resembles a squid’s body. Remember the coconut-watermelon mix we mentioned earlier?
That Thing had transformed into this small creature now. However, the white sac was just a defense mechanism or an outer coating to protect the actual entity inside from Earth’s alien atmosphere.
As Grant approached the sac with a stick to investigate it, the sac opened and a needle was injected into Grant’s belly. The Needle was sentient, and it entered his head right away. The ancient extraterrestrial, sometimes known as the Long One, took the shape of the somewhat hairy Needle. Grant had been chosen as its primary host, and it now shared Grant’s actions, communication abilities, language, and memories with it.
After a while, Grant regained his consciousness, but he was bleeding from his facial orifices. It seemed as if Grant didn’t know where he was and began analyzing his surroundings. Naturally, the alien Needle had done the trick, and Grant wasn’t Grant anymore, or at least he had started to lose control of his own mind and body.
Grant drags a large mound of dry leaves to his basement the next morning and takes a bath in it. The Needle seemed to be forcing him to revert to his innate savage inclinations.
He walks up to discover Starla in her bathrobe and innerwear, listening to music in the living room. He doesn’t appear to know who she is until he looks through the wedding photos, which is odd. Grant appears to have lost all memory, but it reappears when a minor trigger is applied.
When Starla says that she wanted to be a good wife and didn’t want him to feel rejected, his eyes became watery. Probably because deep down, the real Grant was still there, but he knew that it was too late now and that things would soon get out of hand and he would lose his loving wife. Forever.
Later that day, though, Starla tells a coworker about how she had a lovely morning with Grant and how he was finding all of her body parts like a small child. The poor girl doesn’t know that these changes were not anything romantic but something entirely different and deadly. The Needle of the Long One is manipulating Grant’s mind while his heart is trying to reach out to Starla.
Grant later gets up a truck loaded with raw meat and stores it in his cellar. When Starla questions him about it, he says he was arranging a surprise for her birthday, but she gets a bad feeling about it. Grant’s hunger for Starla is fueled by the Needle, and tentacles have sprouted from his breast.
He approaches her in the shower with the intention of sexually assaulting her, but something prevents him from doing so. Grant has some influence over his decisions and actions, while being the Primary Host. His love for Starla stops him from killing her at various intervals throughout the runtime of the film.
At this moment, however, he makes an excuse that he had some urgent work at the office and leaves. He and Starla were supposed to go to the inauguration festival of the deer hunting festival, and he asked Starla to go there alone and promised to meet her there.
He arrives at Brenda’s residence. Meanwhile, Bill approaches Starla during the Deer Cheer Carnival. They enjoy a cordial chat, have a few laughs, and even share a moment until Starla interrupts him and advises that they go inside for the countdown.
It is eventually revealed that Bill and Starla were childhood friends and may have had a romantic relationship. Starla walked up to his window as a 12-year-old girl and informed him she was heading to Hollywood to become a celebrity, and she needed the 14-year-old Bill to accompany her as her bodyguard for security.
But Bill said that all she needed for protection was herself. Funnily enough, she reached the bus station only to be brought back home because Bill had called her father about her little stunt. And, to this day, Bill hasn’t stopped feeling for that impulsive yet ambitious girl.
Grant unbuttons himself to display his horrible chest to Brenda as the mayor counts down to the festival’s start, much to Brenda’s disgust. All the time, Grant was looking for a female to impregnate, but he couldn’t do it with Starla since it would cost her her life. Brenda was, of course, the obvious victim.
Grant used two tentacles that protruded from his belly to inject his reproductive enzymes into her. As the tentacles breached her womb, her body started experiencing violent convulsions caused by the involuntary contraction of muscles. After impregnating her, he came back home and took out all the lights. When Starla came back from the party, she saw a hideous Grant with rashes and swelling all over his face.
Grant had held Brenda, who seemed to be pregnant, chained in a rundown warehouse. She could still talk and think well and rationally, but she was plagued by an obsessive need for raw flesh. Grant brought her the so-called munchies, which she ate without wasting any moment. The more she eats, the better alien babies she would reproduce.
Meanwhile, Bill and Wally arrived at Grant’s residence in search of Brenda, who had gone missing and whom the neighbours had seen him visit. Bill advises Brenda to contact him if she notices anything unusual.
She busted down the basement storehouse, sensing something was wrong, and discovered the bodies of several missing pets from the neighbourhood, as well as a lot of meat.
She immediately called Bill and said, Starla had got Bill’s machine, and Grant heard her monologue and assumed that she had cheated on him with Bill. He went after her to kill her for betraying him, but the good old Bill reached the spot in time to save the day… Well, night in this case.
Grant’s limbs had extended and stretched into a lengthy appendage at this point, and he had transformed further into The Long One. While Margaret cared for Starla, Bill and Wally pursued Grant, but he managed to flee.
Grant had been hunting farm animals for sustenance; the next day, another assault was recorded, and Bill saw a pattern in the attacks and correctly predicted Grant’s next target farm. Officers, mayor Jack MacReady, Starla, and others organised a posse and awaited Grant’s arrival.
Grant was scarcely humanoid when he eventually arrived. Tentacles sprang from his body in numerous places. The others cornered him after Starla challenged him about Brenda. However, Grant bisected one of the members of the posse with a swing of his sharp tentacles and swiftly crawled into the woods.
They followed him and reached the abandoned warehouse where Grant had kept Brenda. They breached inside to find Brenda mutated into an inhuman figure; she was pregnant with thousands of slug-like larvae of the Long One. Her body had morphed into a giant womb, in the middle of which was her little head.
Strangely, even now, she could talk sensibly and enquired about the well-being of her child. It wasn’t long before the slugs tore her giant stomach open and came out. They entered into the mouths of a few people present there, including Wally.
Consider the comparison of bees to have a better understanding of the Long One, his Womb, and her snails. Slugs are worker bees whose task it is to acquire additional food for the freshly created wombs and combine with the Long One if we take the Long One to be the bee who fertilised the womb or mother bee.
This helps the Long One to become bigger and more powerful. The slugs help the Long One to infect additional organisms and bring them under its command. The only good aspect about the slugs is that they can only contaminate someone by entering their mouths, after which point they take over the brain.
When the slugs realised they couldn’t get into Bill, Starla, or Margaret’s mouths, they proceeded to the Strutemyer house and infected the entire family, almost infecting Kylie Strutemyer. She did, however, defeat the Slug and take it from her mouth before scorching it with an ironing rod.
Before that, the Slug stayed within her long enough to show her the Long One’s past, including how it destroys world after planet, devouring all sentient creatures. She found out all that was going on at Wheelsy and with Grant. Kylie managed to flee her house, avoiding the slugs, and was trapped inside the family truck, but the slugs invaded the vehicle from all sides.
Meanwhile at the warehouse, Wally wakes up and starts speaking to Starla in Grant’s dictionary. Soon, the others who had got poisoned with slugs start doing the same. This implies that the Long One and the converters share a hive mind that enables the Long one to control all the infected people and animals.
Additionally, the slug hosts can spit an acidic substance that furiously affects the point of contact. As the Wally-Grant starts to brag about how Starla always needed him to protect her, she shoots him in the head, and Wally’s slug slithers out of his cranium and escapes.
Kylie’s family transforms into zombies and chases her out of the car when she returns home. They speak in their former language and utilise their previous memories, meaning that the slugs maintain their host’s memories and other characteristics.
Bill, on the other hand, arrives at the location, and Kylie sprints over to him. As previously stated, all of the townspeople at the beginning of the film return as zombies. Bill manages to fend them off and gets Kylie into his police cruiser with him.
As they drive, they witness Starla and Jack MacReady being chased by a bunch of zombies. Bill smashes one of them with his car, only to see the love of her life shed off her easy-going nature and turn into a savage and brutal zombie killer. Bill had been trying to reach Shelby so that she could call in the cavalry, and it was only now that his line got connected.
But in an unfortunate turn of events, Shelby herself gets attacked by the slugs, meaning that Wally and his friends were all by themselves. Kylie now reveals to the group whatever she learned when she almost assembled with the slug and tells them that he came from the sky.
When they return to town, they are struck by a truck driven by one of the slug hosts. Surprisingly, these sleepwalkers are nothing like the zombies seen in Hollywood movies. They are able to preserve a portion of their awareness, language, memories, and abilities.
They attack the van in an attempt to kidnap Starla and Jack, but Bill and Kylie manage to get away. Bill and Kylie then resolve to blow up the host and, by extension, the Long One, using a grenade. When Bill returns to the station to grab the grenade, he is ambushed by a zombie deer. Kylie, on the other hand, rushes to Bill’s aid and saves him.
Meanwhile, the zombies at Grant’s house give Starla a makeover and outfit her in the same white underwear she was wearing the morning they last made love, all at Grant’s direction. Starla wakes up and walks up to Grant, but she tries to impale him with the sharp end of her hairbrush.
This infuriates Grant, who wonders if she could murder a billion-year-old organism like him. Bill arrives at the spot and answers, but his grand plan goes to shambles as Grant tosses the grenade with one simple stroke of his tentacles. Bill attempts to get the grenade and throw it back at Grant, but this time, Bill gets thrown out of the window; the grenade is tossed into the pool to blow like a cracker.
Grant had dispatched two of his tentacles to suck out Bill’s insides, and Bill had taken one of them and placed it into a gas cylinder’s hole. Bill instructed Starla to kill Grant as he mistakenly inhaled the gas into his body. Starla learned her spouse was a violent beast from another world who, even as a human, was no better than a jealous and over-possessive husband after an intense discussion.
She shot him, and Grant exploded into bits and pieces. With the explosion, all the other zombies fell flat on the ground. The film ended with Starla, Bill, and Kylie walking out into the dawn, with the dead lying around everywhere. The post-credits scene shows the Needle hissing out of Grant’s brain and attacking a poor cat.
Do let us know how you felt about this deep-dive in the comments. And, if you wish for us to make other videos on films that you like, feel free to tell us. We are here to entertain!