Verdict
Summary
Slugs is everything you;d expect it to be and it’s probably not a good idea to eat anything while watching. This Blu-ray from Arrow is worth picking up.
Plot: The townsfolk of a rural community are dying in strange and gruesome circumstances. Following the trail of horrifically mutilated cadavers, resident health inspector Mike Brady is on the case to piece together the mystery. He soon comes to a terrifying conclusion giant slugs are breeding in the sewers beneath the town, and they re making a meal of the locals!
Review: Has there ever been a horror movie more incongruous than Slugs? Sure there has, but perhaps never with as much gusto or slimy fortitude! Hey, guys, let’s make a movie about jillions of giant, mutant slugs than kill dozens (if not unseen hundreds) of members of a community in spectacularly gross ways – it’ll make a bundle! Such were the days of the VHS boom, where director Juan Piquer Simon (Pieces, The Rift) could unleash a grisly genre film with as much goop, gore, and sex as he could dream up.
Slugs doesn’t offer up much in the way of story. Due to some contaminants, ordinary slugs in the sewers are mutated into numberless hordes of hungry creatures that plop out of household toilets, sink drainage pipes, and other assorted orifices in appliances. The first notable homicide in town is the old hermit who lived in a shack. Poor guy’s face is eaten off, and his yapping dog alerts the authorities to his death. The old geezer’s acquaintance is a health inspector named Mike Brady (Michael Garfield), who promptly takes up a gung ho investigation of the matter, which goes haywire when local yuppies find the mutant slugs in their salads and in their wine glasses. Soon, young lovers are mortified when rudely interrupted mid coitus when they fall off the bed (stark naked, mind you) into a writhing lake of toothy slugs that rip them to shreds. Brady has his work cut out for him as the slugs multiply en masse, forcing him to go Commando on their hides, leading him to come up with a wild plan to get rid of them all before they destroy the entire town.
Icky and nasty, Slugs is a movie I avoided for years. I’ve owned the old Anchor Bay DVD for years with the seal still intact, and so when Arrow Video announced that they’d be releasing a fully loaded and restored Blu-ray of the film, I knew the time to finally watch the movie was nigh. Arrow’s treatment of Slugs is as loving and respectful as their stellar previous releases, with a full 2K restoration, two separate audio commentaries (one with the author of the book the film is based on, and the other by author Chris Alexander), on camera interviews, and much more. Slugs is a horror movie for niche audiences that like their scares slimy and nasty. If you’ve been holding out on watching the film for any reason, now’s the right time to cross over with Arrow’s superb release of this otherwise yucky movie.