Woodyanders Review of Slugs

Slugs (1988)

A satisfyingly scuzzy late 80's killer animal splatter-fest

[8/10 · 18 January 2006]

Juan Piper Simon, that dependably shameless Spanish schlock shocker expert who blessed us with the staggeringly sleazy collegiate slasher swill "Pieces" and the horrendously lame pseudo-Lovecraft loser "Cthulhu Mansion," really outdoes himself with this flamboyantly foul, slimy, gore-soaked, grue-drenched, hell, flat-out outrageously splatteriffic bastardization of Shaun Hutson's sensationally squalid best-selling novel. A mutant strain of your average inveterate garden pests develop an insatiable craving for human flesh and subsequently start snacking on the deserving dipstick denizens of a heretofore dreary and uneventful snobby upstate New York suburb. The plot's every bit as trite and predictable as the above synopsis suggests. The cardboard cut-out characters are dull and nondescript. The performances from an uniformly atrocious cast are wooden enough to give your DVD player the TV equivalent to Dutch Elm disease. The dubbing simply stinks. Both the script and direction are very plodding and inept. However, the profoundly uncomfortable sense of unceasing, stomach-knotting vileness which permeates every last fetid frame of this gross, grimy, hideously ghastly fright flick makes it perversely enjoyable just the same. And the extravagantly gory'n'grody slug attack scenes certainly make this putrid picture a top-rate trashy winner. A poor handyman has to hack off his own hand with a hatchet after a slug crawls into his work glove. Another hapless fellow inadvertently eats a slug that somehow wound up in his salad (!) which later causes the guy's nose to bleed profusely into a glass of water and baby slugs to explode forth from his eyes. Two horny teens furiously fornicating their sweaty socks off get chomped in the nastiest example of celluloid coitus interruptus you are ever likely to witness in a killer mankind-munching carnivorous slug flick. Moreover, another little girl also gets graphically devoured and one luckless dude even falls into a sewer full of the murderous mollusks. Sure, this movie possesses no redeemable artistic attributes to speak of (and frankly who really cares about that pretentious high-falutin' nonsense?), but it's definitely so laughably bad and shoddy (not to mention downright ridiculous) that it overall cuts it as a good deal of righteously gruesome and lovably ludicrous cheeseball creature feature fun.