The film is set in the fictional small town of Wheelsy where, in the opening scene, a meteorite crashes to earth. Elizabeth Banks (The 40 Year-Old Virgin) plays Starla Grant, a young woman married to the much older – and much richer - Grant Grant (Michael Rooker). One night, while fooling around with another woman, Grant stumbles upon a cocoon that came out of the meteorite. A sharp, worm-like creature shoots out and burrows into his chest. Almost immediately, Grant starts to morph into the proverbial something else. He develops oozing wounds all over his body and he just can’t eat enough meat. When the local supermarket runs out, he begins chowing down on neighborhood pets.

Starla discovers her husband’s new state (he passes it off as a reaction to a bee sting) and calls local police chief Bill Pardy (Serenity’s Nathan Fillion). Pardy has always carried a torch for Starla, so he’s naturally willing to help. The investigation leads to a run-down shed, where a shocking discovery is made in spectacularly gruesome way: an alien being has unleashed thousands of swarming red slugs that forcibly enter peoples’ mouths and burrow into their brains.

Some of you will probably stop reading the review right here. You are not the audience for this film. Forget it and see something else instead. Those of you who are still with me will want to know a few things: lots of people get infested with the relentless slugs; the only way to remove them is by blowing them out of the skull; and Grant serves as a command center for all the infected persons, so Pardy and Starla need to destroy him in order for everyone else to survive.

A couple years ago, there was a film I really liked called Shaun of the Dead. It was half legitimate zombie flick, half parody. Slither kind of falls into the same category. The horror scenes are seriously squirm-inducing; every time the slugs started attaching themselves to innocent victims, I began to get the creepy-crawly itchiness that often accompanies such images. At the same time, this is a very funny film. Writer/director James Gunn (who penned the Scooby-Doo movies as well as the Dawn of the Dead remake) once worked for the schlock studio Troma, and he has intentionally crafted a piece of entertainment that aims to be outrageous in a B-movie way.

Some of the humor comes from the extremeness of the gore – I mean, a person balloons up and then explodes into a giant mass of slugs, for crying out loud – but some of it also comes from the characterizations too. As he proved in Serenity, Nathan Fillion has a dry sense of comic delivery that renders his punch lines hilarious. Even funnier is Gregg Henry, who plays the often belligerent mayor of Wheelsy. He greets the situation with a mixture of annoyance and pants-wetting fear. Some of his lines (which I won’t give away here) are priceless in their sarcasm.

What is it really that makes a movie like Slither appealing to some people? Well, I think it has to do with the simple but usually unacknowledged idea that being grossed out can be kind of fun. Especially these days, when most taboos have long been shattered, there is something kind of appealing about watching a film take pride in pushing the envelope. As someone with an admittedly odd fondness for over-the-top gore, I got a kick out of the sheer willingness of Slither to be outrageous. To be clear, there is a difference between realistic sadism (the kind most recently practiced by The Hills Have Eyes) and the tongue-in-cheek gore practiced here. The former dares you to look at it; the latter dares you to look away.

There are all kinds of disgusting images on display here, but despite their graphicness, I didn’t take offense to them. They’re slimy and unrealistic, which makes them non-threatening even as they elicit continual shrieks of “ewww!” You know whether or not Slither is a movie you’d want to see. If comic/gore flicks are your thing, this is one of best in a long time.

( out of four)

Slither is rated R for strong horror violence and gore, and language. The running time is 1 hour and 33 minutes.