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Your Tip is Bring Home More Beer

by Emily on May 3rd, 2012
Posted In: Comic

I have been working for a new organic burger joint for the past two months.  Yes, you two can have a glamorous job like this when you get a college education!  I just started a new job as an administrative assistant at an apartment rental company.  The hours are way better, I get paid more, and it generally sucks much less so my burger slinging days may be numbered!

This note did brighten my day at work though.

Hey you know what’s cool?  I have sold some mini-comics on Etsy.  And one of them went to Australia, and another went to England.  THAT’S RIGHT WORLD RENOWNED COMIC ARTIST RIGHT HERE  NBD

I might not be world renowned, but I still feel pretty cool.  Thanks, internet!

 

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The Tree of Life aka If You Want To Portray a Texan Family From Scratch, You Must First Create the Universe.

by Carl on July 25th, 2011
Posted In: Blog, Reviews

A group of physicists known as the Virgo Consortium once used a computer to create a map of the universe. The finished shape of their map was something totally astounding. The universe, as best as we know, is shaped just like a brain cell.

The photo on the left is of a mouse brain cell, but the coincidence is still spooky. Images have a tendency to repeat in nature due to math or evolutionary advantage: spirals and branches and nuclei. This could be the cause. We could also be wrong about the shape of the universe. It could all just be a coincidence. Or maybe… maybe life itself is more closely linked with the universe than we imagined? Maybe life is more than just a random accident in the giant unforgiving cosmos?

This is the stance Terrence Malick’s new film takes. The Tree of Life is a staggering masterpiece, a humbling, refreshing, enlightening movie that warmed my soul and fired up my neurons. It covers a scope that few artists have the bravery to tackle and even fewer have the skill to pull off. Malick has both. This a movie that does all the things bad pretentious movies do, but it does them well. Watching The Tree of Life I felt as breathlessly amazed as Carl Sagan when he soared among the stars in his Spaceship of the Imagination. Sagan always looked a little dopey, staring agape at things that weren’t really there. But I probably looked just as dopey staring at this movie.

The Tree of Life opens with a mysterious blob of light and color, and whispered narrations. It’s one of the movie’s genius techniques, these whispered narrations. The whispering makes you realize that the narrator is not talking to the audience, but instead quietly thinking about deep mysteries to himself. Clever. We are introduced to a woman known only as Mrs. O’Brien. She says something that becomes a driving force for the entire movie. “People can go one of two ways: the way of nature, and the way of grace.” And which is which we wonder? And the movie only makes us wonder more.

We begin with the O’Brien family as they find themselves facing tragedy. The tragedy itself is never fully explained. Malick is painting with big ideas, specifics would mean nothing. As if the strokes weren’t broad enough, we are then taken to the beginning of the universe. We follow it’s birth up through the creation of galaxies, of earth, of life. I can’t say how long the sequence lasts. 20, 30 minutes? I was lost in it. From there we see the O’Brien family again. We watch the children come into existence, grow, and have childhoods. The O’Briens and their own little universe. The kids play, they discover, they learn. They do good things and bad things. It’s Life 101. And what in the hell, as many complain, does a family in Texas have to do with the universe? Malick has taken the humbling tale of The Cold and Uncaring Cosmos and infused it with humanity. Here is our place in the universe. What do we do with it? The way of nature? Or the way of grace?

On the surface it seems that the mother represents the way of grace, with her quiet acceptance of the way things are but still holds a deep love for life. And then the father represents the way of nature, with his headstrong theories on fighting your way through the world, teeth a-gnashing, if you have any hope of becoming successful. He’s harsh and strict with his family, verbally and sometimes physically abusive. And yet parents contradict their own pegholes, as humans do. Contradiction is an essence of humanity, one we try to ignore. The mother may go the way of grace, but she is passive. She has no pride in her grace. The father may go the way of nature, but he has a passion for music. In one scene he plays an organ, which represents grace better than any other instrument I know. He invents for a living, and tends to a garden. He is creator, a bringer and caretaker of life. His yelling and hitting hurts his children, but then so does the silent fury the mother inflicts on them when they’re in trouble. They are a normal American family from the 50s, living in a beautifully contradicting combination of grace and nature.

Malick does not lay his film’s ideas out all bare and simple. There are many curious moments with no concrete answer. They make us wonder what Malick was getting at.. A shot of the Mother hovering above the ground. The candles. They exist to create their own definition for each individual viewer. Not every shot is a beautiful mystery waiting to be unpacked. Like the DDT truck. I admit I laughed inappropriately at that. Something about kids mirthfully poisoning themselves just struck my insensitive funny bone. Honestly though, that may be the one portion that doesn’t quite fit. An ironic detachment about how little people in the 50s knew about what was poisoning them. It doesn’t quite jibe with the the other, more colossal themes.

There are stronger curious moments. Look to the wounded dinosaur that lies on its side, bleeding in a riverbed. A predator comes along, puts its foot on it, thinks for a moment, and leaves. Did we just see a primitive creature showing divine mercy? It flies in the face of biology, but then think of all the other strange mysteries in the world that disrupt our scientific understandings. By showing an animal do something distinctly human, Malick is giving us what? The idea that maybe humanity, emotions, thought are embedded deep within the universal construct? I don’t think there’s a right answer to this anomaly of a scene, but that’s what makes it such a great one. And there is the climax, where one of the grown sons (Sean Penn) wanders onto a beautiful beach where many people, including his own family members, walk. Is this heaven? Nirvana? An imagined plane of existence? Is he dreaming or is he really there? The specifics don’t matter, but the broad stroke does: it’s enlightenment. Notice how Penn rises in an elevator before the beach scene. Notice how he comes down that same elevator afterwards, returning to ground level. Notice the peace on his face after he leaves the building. The beach may mean something different to each one of us, but it still means enlightenment to all of us. He has found his place in the universe. He has accepted the unanswerable and absorbed inner peace.

It’s tough to accept that Malick may be wrong. Maybe life and humanity aren’t tied into the construct of the universe. Maybe we are a random anomaly. Maybe Malick is lying to himself, and in turn us. But Malick puts repeating images throughout the movie. A spiral of stained glass in the beginning resembles a shell and also the center of a sunflower in the end. Grace and nature. A shot of a many galaxies that could be easily mistaken for a grouping of cells. A shot of a many cells that could be easily mistaken for a grouping of galaxies. ‘There’s some sort of underlying plan here,’ is what Malick is telling us, ‘and I don’t know what it is, but I think we’re a big part of it.’

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Transformers: Dark of the Moon AKA The One With No Robot Genitals

by Carl on July 10th, 2011
Posted In: Blog, Reviews

Transformers: Dark of the Moon is fascinating in the way that a fireworks show is. Shit blows up. It blows up real good. And it looks pretty in its own destructive way. Now if only more fireworks shows would unintentionally tear open their chest and reveal the black heart of America. That would be one hell of a 4th of July. While it’s an altar of worship to spectacle, Transformers 3 hides in its soul some very ugly feelings of sexism and materialism.

With fireworks, it doesn’t take long for my fascination to turn to boredom. 20 minutes tops. So you can guess how well two and half hours of Transformers went. Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! But I remained diligent, waiting for the movie to slip up and turn into a shitshow so I could pounce on it like an asshole tiger. I came to the NASCAR race hoping for a big, gory car crash. I almost got one. Although it’s not my cup of tea, I’m forced to admit that for the most part, the movie serves its intended functions. It’s all about the spectacle. Michael Bay is talented, and his talent lies in the creation of the spectacle. Look at one of the very first shots, where a spaceship is being chased by several missiles, all of them leaving smoke trails in a pretty geometric pattern. Hell, the whole planet of Robottown (correction: Cybertron) is a geometric pattern. Plot, character, these things are only support beams to the Grand Altar of Spectacle. This is not necessarily a bad thing. If every movie solely worshipped Spectacle, that would be a bad thing. But they do not, even though Hollywood encourages it.  I’ve liked Michael Bay movies before. You know what’s awesome? The Rock. The Rock is awesome. Hell, many a great movie has been made mixing spectacle with other, deeper things. We know it’s objectively bad, but most of us see it anyway. In fact, if someone were to ever tell me Transformers should not exist while they were smoking a cigarette, I would punch that person in the mouth.

I’m gonna keep rolling with this cigarette analogy. A single cigarette is bad, but it won’t kill you. The tobacco gives you pretty nice buzz, but cigarettes have some nasty shit in them too. Nicotine, tar, dog crap, whatever else they had on those posters in the elementary school cafeteria. Carcinogens. Repeated exposure to those carcinogens will kill you. Keep rolling on this: mindless yet spectacular explosions, giant fighting robots, shit getting destroyed: that’s your tobacco. Your cultural mind (if you will), is getting a nice buzz. Then there’s the bad shit: lazy plot, flat characters, no emotion. These are bad things, not carcinogens, but still bad. Repeated exposure will be harmful to your cultural mind’s health. Hollywood should not be getting away with these things, but we give it up for the sake of getting the buzz. Some of us know, but don’t care. Others aren’t even aware. This is the stuff most critics are bitching about. The plot and characters are made barely passable enough to get by. Optimus Prime is a bland motherfucker. He serves his purpose as hero leader, and that’s it. Bumblebee is the Loveable Kid disguised as a badass robot. I know everyone loves Bumblebee, but I will never get the golden shower he gave John Turturro out of my head. Everyone else has similarly bland roles. The protagonist, the ideal woman, the conniving but ultimately good shuckster, the weird boss, the embarrassing parents. You know them all. Like I said, they’re support pillars for the spectacle.

Then there’s the carcinogens. The really nasty stuff. This shit shouldn’t be there in the first place, and we shouldn’t allow it into the next cigarette we wanna have. Repeated exposure to these cancerous substances will kill your cultural mind. I’m referring to Transformers’ very ugly ideals. The materialism, the sexism, the craftily hidden racism. These things scare me, I don’t like seeing these ugly thoughts being subtly presented to an audience. Remember that the biggest public grievance in Revenge of the Fallen was the two stereotyped robots, dubbed by most as the ‘ghetto bots.’ There was some very well deserved outrage and they were removed from Dark of the Moon. Well, THEY specifically were removed. Now instead of two squat stereotypes speaking ebonics, we have two squat stereotypes speaking heavy cockney. Cause who gets offended over British stereotypes? Someone in the creative side of the movie, desperate to keep his beloved squat comic relief robots, but not ready to give them something a little deeper and more original than a flat stereotype, decided to go with the stereotype that would probably incur the least amount of wrath. And so, the fat cockney bots were born.

Then there’s the gratuitous materialism. Everyone, and I mean everyone, values their 6 figure cars, fancy houses and offices above all else. It’s one thing to have A-list people, places, things all over the place. It’s another to make it seem like these are the only things that matter. CEOs out there are probably loving what this presents to an audience. Even the Autobots, alien robots with little interest in human elitism, get in on it. Notice how they always have transformed themselves into the nicest possible vehicles. If you’re a soldier in a war, and you can change the appearance of what you morph into, why not be more utilitarian about it? Instead Optimus goes for the flaming paint job that probably means nothing aesthetically to a cyborg. The Decepticons, may be mass murderers, but they got one thing right, they stick to a uniform gray. It helps them blend in, nothing showy or fancy on these guys. It’s the good guys who get all flashy.

And then there’s the sexism. Part of it’s easy to spot: Sam Witwicky’s girlfriend, Carly, is the ideal woman. Hot, sexy, British, a Victoria’s Secret model in real life. Smart, but not smarter than him, playful, finds his faults attractive. No real woman walks on the balls of her feet at home. This is not the thing that riles me up. It’s expected with the tobacco. But what really irks me is this:

1)      Carly does nothing. She does not help in anyway, she is merely in peril and must be saved, even though everyone else is capable of saving themselves. In fact, the one thing she does do to aid her friends and advance the plot is that she uses her feminine wiles to manipulate and trick someone else. Because apparently, that’s the only thing a sexy lady is good for.

2)      Frances McDormand plays Mearing, the headstrong director of the NSA. She really does not like being referred to as ‘ma’am.’ It’s a recurring thing. There is a scene in Mearing’s office where she fills Sam and Carly in on some irrelevant plot details. The ‘ma’am’ thing comes up. “Don’t call me ma’am. I’m not a ma’am.” Says Mearing. “No,” replies Carly, “You’re not a ma’am.” The supermodel hottie Carly is telling the independent, fierce and successful Mearing that she is not a woman. Intentionally or no, the movie is telling us that Mearing, and women like Mearing, are not to be idealized. The “ideal woman” is actively deriding an independently successful woman. It’s disgusting and unacceptable.

So to bunch this all together neatly: I don’t consider Transformers: Dark of the Moon to be a bad movie because it is a mindless bunch of explosions. I consider it to be a bad movie because of the poisonous subtext that displays the dark side of American culture and propogates it to an unsuspecting audience. Consider this: I saw this movie as a double feature with Werner Herzog’s new documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Both movies chose to climax in the same way: with nothing more than a series of images set to music. Stripped of context, both filmmakers allowed the images to speak for themselves for a very long period of time. One was a series of shots of cave paintings. The other was a series of shots of robots beating the metallic shit out of each other. I found the former fascinating, and the latter boring. But I know countless other people will feel the opposite way. I guess it all depends on how long you can watch a fireworks show without getting bored.

1/4

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Cave of Forgotten Dreams aka The Birth of Culture, Art, Humanity IN EYE POPPING 3D!!!

by Carl on July 8th, 2011
Posted In: Blog, Reviews

The opening shot of Cave of Forgotten Dreams is the most striking image in any 3D movie I’ve seen to date. This is one I’ll remember. You are deposited in a farm field in France, crouched at knee height. Some small trees are being grown in this field, I don’t know what they are. The camera rises, we see a river running under a giant natural arch of stone, and we fly under it. This field is just outside of Chauvet Cave, the subject of Werner’s Herzog’s documentary.  There is nothing spectacular about the field itself, but the way the 3D is employed here (and in the rest of the movie) is what stands out. Most good uses of 3D act as kind of window of depth. You peer into the movie, the different fields being portrayed at different distances. But when Cave of Forgotten Dreams opens, there you are in that field, with the small trees coming out of the screen at the edge of your peripheries. You’ve been effectively placed in the middle of the movie.

The illusion holds up for nearly the whole running time. Herzog guides us towards the cave, giving us the history of its discovery. Chauvet Cave holds the world’s oldest known cave paintings, the earliest piece of art. For the first expedition in, Herzog wasn’t able to use the professional camera. The image becomes flat and grainy. Shame. It kills the illusion. Subsequent expeditions with the professional 3D rig bring back the illusion. Once again, you feel like you are walking there with the crew. Herzog harnesses the environment, allowing the contours of the cave walls to detail and texture the cave paintings. You can see them the way they were originally presented 30,000 years ago.

The cave only tells us so much about the people living there. All the clues are just simple points of known data. Everything else is unknown. Leave it to Herzog to describe it more eloquently than anyone else. It’s like a Manhattan phone directory, he says. We have 5 million names, addresses and numbers. But what do those people think, feel and dream about? The directory cannot tell us. It’s funny, because Herzog shoehorns this idea into an interview he’s having with an archaeologist, as though the concept’s been gnawing at him and he’s been waiting to share it. The cave, having provided all the data points that it can, has been sealed shut by the French governement, to protect its treasures inside.

In that way, Herzog’s film is important piece of preservation. These are the earliest known works of art, and we will never be able to see them in person. This movie, with its ingenious use of 3D, allows us to see the space of the cave, the contours of its walls. It’s the closest we’ll get. In one moment, Herzog asks the crew to stay silent, so that we may listen to the cave. Feel its presence. He also wisely allows us an extended look at the paintings. Long shots of each wall, with a passing light to illuminate the details, the way the paintings flow with the curves in the rock wall. This is a movie that lets itself soak in.

Herzog goes on strange little side trips throughout the movie, as he will: he interviews a man who labels himself as an “experimental archaeologist.” We first see him clothed in deer fur. I think you get the idea. Another man who found renown in perfume industry for his superhuman sense of smell now travels France, sniffing the air for undiscovered cave entrances. One side trip I found fascinating followed the course of a single image found in the cave; it was that a woman’s lower half. Hell, it may have been man’s first porno. Herzog traces this image further ahead in history, finding it in all kinds of other, later, ancient civilizations. It’s a little scary until you remind yourself that men just really love vaginas. There is also postscript about albino alligators, whatever it was Herzog was getting at made sense to me at the time, but now I’ve forgotten the connection. These things are only tangentially related to Chauvet Cave and humankind’s first artworks, but hey: allow an artist his idiosyncrasies, and you open yourself up to the possibility of enlightenment. I didn’t exactly find enlightenment in Cave of Forgotten Dreams, but it is the kind of fascinating documentary you would expect from Werner Herzog, and like I said before, I feel it serves an important cultural purpose. A point of data can only say so much, but this one says a lot.

3.5/4

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Pirates 4 aka Attack of the Vampire Rapist Web-Shooting Mermaids!

by Carl on May 23rd, 2011
Posted In: Blog, Blog, Reviews

When the jester becomes the voice of reason, all is not well in the kingdom. There was one thing I feared most with the new Pirates of the Caribbean, that they would make Jack Sparrow a heroic protagonist. And thank god that is the one thing they didn’t do.  On Stranger Tides saves face by remembering just what makes its popular folk hero such a folk hero. And Michael Bolton put it best, Jack is the “jester of Tortuga.” There is a moment where Jack becomes the voice of reason, it is (thankfully) played for laughs. Overall, On Strangers Tides isn’t so much a shambled mess as it is a bland exercise in generic storytelling. Well, it tried one thing different: vampire rapist web-shooting mermaids. That didn’t work out so well.

Jack, Barbossa, some Spaniards, et al are on an epic quest to find Ponce de MacGuffin’s fabled Fountain of Youth.  This becomes a series of set-pieces, some of them fun, most of them tiresome, underused or both. Well, I thought, it’s been about an hour now and I can take comfort in knowing that they won’t try to shoehorn a love story into it.

Then this asshole takes his shirt off:

Philip is a missionary taken hostage by the dread pirate Blackbeard. He falls in love with a pretty mermaid, chastity be damned. Can’t fault him on that one. He does forget that he is trying to spread the word of God is favor of doinking a fish-lady. How do mermaids take to being forced to switch religions in wedlock? She falls in love with him because he’s the only one who cares about her well-being. Yes, Blackbeard needs her alive, but couldn’t care less if she suffocates, y’know. When Blackbeard smacks the fair mermaid, Philip struggles against the guard holding him like a raging shirtless gorilla. Hilarious. Normally I wouldn’t believe that an ordinary person could be so oafishly boneheaded, but a missionary… I can buy it. Hell, there’s a lot of room for thought on the fact that Disney is trying to make a man of the cloth into a sex symbol.

But I’m wandering. Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush perform with aplomb, having eased back into familiar roles. Penelope Cruz does rather admirably for herself. Thinking back, I’ve realized that she told us more about the character with performance than with the written dialogue. She turned a boring love-tagonist into a larger than life character. The chemistry between her and Depp is particularly scintillating, mainly because their encounters often end with Jack Sparrow getting emasculated. My favorite was when Cruz grabbed a big, phallic poisonous snake and shoved it in a terrified Depp’s face. Now let’s poor one out for poor Ian McShane. McShane’s performance was like a vicious dog on a chain. Held back and trying to break free. You gotta hand it to director Rob Marshall, it was probably harder to make Ian McShane of all people give a constrained performance than it was to let him fly off the handle like a psychotically evil pirate should. Really you can’t blame them, here was a perfect piece of casting for a poorly written character. Here’s the thing about great villains, they don’t think of themselves as villains. One of the first lines out of Blackbeard’s mouth is “I am a bad man.” Nothing makes a villain more dull than a statement like that.

And then there’s his motivation. Why is Blackbeard hunting for the Fountain of Youth? Because a prophecy said so. I hate the A Prophecy Said So motivation. I hate hate hate hate hate it. It’s the Writers-Couldn’t-Think-Of-Anything-Better trick. Last year’s Alice in Wonderland used it to drive the entire plot. It’s a bullshit excuse to move a story forward. A sham. As for this movie, what prophecy? Who said it? How strongly do you believe them? Blackbeard does not give this answers. [Spoiler time, might wanna jump to the next paragraph!] Cruz’s motivation is equally lame, all her decisions are basically ‘BECAUSE I LOVE MY DAD JEEZ.’ For the better part of the movie, I did not actually believe that Cruz was Blackbeard’s daughter. She was already established as untrustworthy, she doesn’t give any backstory, and her motivations can’t be that simplistic. Right? Riiight?

And that leads me to the two biggest detriments the newest installment contains: the lack of details, and the lack of internal logic. That lack of backstory I just mentioned? That’s a big problem. With the early movies, the devil was in the details. Remember that extended monologue in Black Pearl about Bootstrap Bill? It was stuff like that that made the world of the movie feel bigger, more intricate, more alive. And now that’s gone. We can’t even get a bit of explanation for Anjelica and Blackbeard’s past. It simply is there, because she says it’s there. That’s why I didn’t believe her. This lends itself to the movie’s lack of internal logic too.

I usually don’t pick on a fantasy movie’s logic. That seems petty to me. But with this movie, it’s actually a harmful problem. Why does Blackbeard need zombie officers? What purpose do they serve other than ‘harder to kill?’ How is he so versed in voodoo arts? What’s up with the anti-grav water? Why is Blackbeard’s boat magical? That one could have been answered with a single sentence, ‘it’s powered by the souls he’s killed,’ or some shit. My brain would have been satisfied, because it would have answered to the movie’s internal logic. Like I said, I’m not being smart-ass, I just can’t accept these things if the movie feels no need to have to explain them. And I was only exaggerating a little bit about those vampire rapist web-shooting mermaids. They really are rapists.

There’s a gag I simply must bring up. Jack leads the rest to a dead end. Unsure of what to do, he ostentatiously raises two silver chalices and bangs them together. Nothing happens. You know that gag. Someone-Does-Something-Grand-But-Nothing-Happens-Hahaha. I know you know it, because the audience knew it. There were some anticipatory giggles when Jack raised the chalices. We knew the punchline before it was even given. Then he bangs and chalices and nothing happens. There is silence. Not just in the movie, but in the audience too. Nobody’s laughing at the part where we’re supposed to be laughing. The joke is tired. We’ve all heard it.

One last thing, there is scene early on where we see Richard Griffiths (Vernon Dursley from Harry Potter) and Roger Allam (the dick TV host from V For Vendetta) as the king and prime minister of England, respectively. You couldn’t cast two better character actors to play pompous British twats. For me this was the highest point of the movie. So far, things had been really fun. And I here I thought I’d be seeing more of two character actors doing what they do best.  Sadly that was their only scene. And now I realize that the most enjoyable part of the movie was all before the pirates set out on open water. When the pirate-y part of Pirates of the Caribbean becomes tiresome, there’s clearly an issue. The 2nd and 3rd movies tried to rectify this, but fell over under their own self-serious weight. At least they tried to do something different. What made Black Pearl so great and the other sequels worthwhile were that they were unique from the average summer blockbuster. On Stranger Tides on the other, is formulaic. In the movie, Barbossa sells himself out to the Royal Navy, but it’s clear he’s ill at ease and he eventually gives in to his pirate nature. Let’s hope the series does the same.

2/4

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Slither aka Fillion Fights Fearsome Foes From Farthest Fantasies!

by Carl on May 20th, 2011
Posted In: Blog, Blog, Reviews

3/4

And here I was expecting a spoof. Slither, the directorial debut of James Gunn (who also wrote/directed the excellent Super), is a straight up monster movie. It is not an homage, it is not a satire. It is not honoring the genre, because it is very happily a piece of the genre. And that’s not a bad thing. It plays by the rules of its genre, but it does so with a grin and a wink that make it very charming.

In a small town in the middle of nowhere, a meteor has crashed into the woods and… well, you know the drill. Filtered through Gunn’s deliciously unique sense of humor, Slither has the advantage of one-liners that are actually funny, and moments that are as hilarious as terrifying. What makes Slither unique is its characters, who are rather likable and often complex for a monster picture. Grant (Michael Rooker) is at odds with his wife, Starla (Elizabeth Banks). She’s not meeting his sexual needs and he takes refuge in the bar, drowning his frustrations. Meanwhile, Sheriff Bill Pardy (Nathan Fillion) is hopelessly in love with the beautiful Starla. This sounds pretty expected, but consider this: Starla really does love Grant, and she wants to make the marriage work. Pardy, while primed to be the Nice Guy to Grant’s Douchebag, is really himself a douchebag (you know, the kind only Nathan Fillion could make lovable), going so far as to call one of his friends a “fat fuck” just for mentioning his crush on Starla. On top of that, Starla never even gives an indication of having feelings for Pardy. Interesting.

But back to Grant, who has now run off into the woods with a trampy girl he met at the bar. Look, there is the Obligatory Crow. Hello Obligatory Crow! You were placed here ironically, weren’t you? We know what’s coming now. And here’s where Gunn surprised us. Grant realizes that the fidelity of his marriage is more important than a screw and he stops himself. Giving the monster’s first victim any redeeming qualities is a cardinal sin, and yet Gunn makes it work. I think back to Chuck Russell’s ’88 remake of The Blob, another joyful reprise of the old monster genre, which also breaks this seemingly vital rule in spectacular fashion.

As the movie develops, so does the love triangle. Grant is now controlled by the aliens and it becomes The Nice Guy Vs. The Monster. Only the Nice Guy is actually an insufferable douche when it comes to women, and the Monster is just acting on his natural impulses. Like a drunken frat boy trying to get laid at a party, the alien just wants to grow and multiply, as is its nature. Monster Grant tries to seduce her in his disgusting, slimy way and meanwhile, Pardy only really acts to protect her without making any kind of move himself. And all the while, Starla still loves her husband. Even at the end of the movie, there is no clear indication whether Starla has any intention of getting together with Pardy or not. I think it’s complexities like that that keep Slither interesting throughout its runtime. With Slither, you either roll with the genre and dig it, or you give up on the familiar plot and leave it be.

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