Slugs (1988)

Original title: Slugs, Muerte Viscosa

aka Slugs: The Movie

A lot of people, and I mean a lot of people die curious, icky, violent deaths in a US small town. We the audience know the deaths are caused by a humungous horde of mutated, flesh-eating slugs, but the authorities don’t. Well, heroic health official Mike Brady (Michael Garfield) figures it out relatively quickly, but he walks into a Mayor of Amity/German COVID policy situation where neither said mayor nor the police are going to be any help at all, or worse. Mike does team up with a British slugologist and the head of the city’s sanitation department in a sort of coalition of the people who really keep a place running.

Slugs, based on a novel by trash horror expert Shaun Hutson (that’s where the “The Movie” comes from) was directed by Spanish bizarro movie expert Juan Piquer Simón. His Pieces is often treated as one of those perfect, “it’s so bad, it’s good” movies, but never really did much for me but bore; on the other hand, he is also the director of the transcendentally weird and wonderful Supersonic Man.

The curious thing about Simón, a guy whose projects nearly always sound psychotronic in a way that doesn’t suggest slickness, is that he was clearly a talented director, with a good sense of pacing and editing rhythms and at the very least a solid grasp of the craftsmanship aspects of filmmaking. He just tended to apply his talents to movies with scripts going from the bizarre to the outright crazy, and often on budgets so clearly insufficient, even attempting to make these movies has a whiff of the heroic or Ancient Greek style hubris.

Slugs, curiously enough, is one of the man’s less impoverished films, providing Simón many an opportunity to show off his filmmaking skills. It’s just that he’s demonstrating them on a film about killer slugs full of insane set pieces that make little sense but are also unutterably awesome, presenting a series of gore gags that start out absurd and become increasingly freakish. This is a film that puts a scene of an elderly gardener cutting off his own arm because the slugs have snuck into his gardening gloves and are eating his hand (which somehow ends in an exploding greenhouse, but one has to see that one to believe) relatively early as something of a sign post things are going to become weirder still. And indeed, the film’s not lying, that’s nothing, for it soon reaches the point where a gentleman who accidentally ate a hacked up slug in a salad gets his head melted by the parasitic worms living inside snails. And Slugs is still not going to stop there. Will it be any surprise in this context to mention that the heroic way our heroic health official and co manage to save the day also seems to blow up most of the sets of the town the whole thing has taken place in?

It’s pretty incredible. Simón seldom stops for a breather between the slug attacks or variations on animal attack movie tropes turned absurd by the fact everyone’s trying to deny an infestation of killer slugs (who will bite your finger if you present it) caused by poisonous waste event though people are dying in droves and heads are imploding into wormy mush in restaurants. But then, the town this takes place in seems to be situated in Spain as well as the US, depending on which country any given scene was shot in, so I’m not too surprised everybody’s a bit confused.

The effects are not as unpleasant as they may sound, but go for a kind of wondrously fake gloopiness instead of the naturalistic gross-out, turning this gory killer slug movie into a charmer of a film.

Past Misdeeds: Supersonic Man (1979)

This is a re-run with only the slightest of edits, so please don’t ask me what the heck I was thinking when I wrote any given entry into this section.

aka Sonic Man (which I can only imagine to be a side story about our hero’s less favoured brother)

Poor Professor Morgan (José María Caffarel)! He is such a genius when it comes to energy SCIENCE! (energytology?), that evil, perhaps ever so slightly crazy, villain Dr. Gulik (Cameron Mitchell) sends out a bunch of his sub-COBRA goons and one of his oh so very impressive killer robots to kidnap him, somehow making the authorities believe the good Professor defected somewhere leaving a lot of dead bodies behind.

Fortunately, some aliens have decided that enough is enough with all that human nonsense, and have sent out superhero Supersonic (Richard Yesteran) to take care of business on Earth. When he’s not flying around to a one-finger synthesizer version of the Superman theme, or activating his varied superpowers via finger pointing and weird hand gestures, Supersonic (probably not Supes to his friends for copyright reasons) works as a moustachioed private eye. In this function he more or less stumbles (we shouldn’t ascribe to purpose what we can ascribe to random chance in this movie) upon Morgan’s daughter Patricia (Diana Polakov), who doesn’t believe her father could do anything morally dubious at all, and could really use a private eye to find him.

The private eye business will turn out to be Supersonic’s greatest weakness once he gets down to the whole thwarting evil Dr. Gulik, rescuing good Professor Morgan business, because like all private eyes, he too has the tendency to get conked in the head from behind, which makes life somewhat difficult for a superhero who needs to talk into – or at least think at – his (magic) space watch to transform. Hopefully, random chance will help him out there too.

I’m not much of a fan of the Italian and Spanish rip-offs of Superman, perhaps because I already don’t find the original to be exactly riveting (I’m very sorry, but Superman as a character does little for me, probably because I find perfection incredibly boring), but most probably because most of the resulting films were neither particularly inspired nor particularly crazy, which could only ever leave us with a shoddy superhero movie. [Future me’s position towards the first two Superman movies has rather improved, yet I still don’t like the rip-offs any better].

Juan Piquer Simón’s Supersonic Man is the great exception to the rule, because while it’s as shoddy, dumb, and silly as three other cheap superhero movies combined, it is also a film containing oh so many indelible charms I find it utterly impossible to resist it. There may be little the film does actually right – except for Simón’s frequent cinematographer Juan Mariné’s surprisingly pleasant photography – but most everything it does wrong, it does in delightful ways that’ll convince you a man in a cape can fly over a fake yet beautiful model of a house.

What the film, or rather Simón, does particularly right is finding a way to actually awaken Cameron Mitchell from the stupor he is in during too many of his low budget nonsense outings and get him to chew the scenery in his own inimitable way, like a prettier William Shatner on very bad drugs. During the course of the film, Mitchell gets to chew and spit out not only scenery, helpless co-actors, and possibly your mind, he also has at least half a dozen great, absolutely ridiculous villain speeches. If you’re really lucky, he does give these while having “philosophical” – which in the context of this film means “deeply stupid” - discussions with Caffarel’s Professor, whom he always keeps at his side to have someone to gloat at. Caffarel, speaking lots and lots of more loquacious versions of the words “tut, tut, you evil madman” does make a contrast that helps Mitchell shine extra bright, too, for where dear old Mister Mitchell gloats, gesticulates and mugs, Caffarel is clearly above emoting (or really, moving too much), possibly because he’s afraid that Mitchell will eat him too.

There are many other joys to be had in Supersonic Man, and not just the way Supersonic (the Man is clearly implicit) goes out of his way to not help henchmen in need (making the last Superman movies look much friendlier all of a sudden), or the fact that the film is absolutely hilarious, except in those moments when it is actually trying to be hilarious through that most horrid type of comic relief – a homeless comedy alcoholic. I could probably go on listing things for a few thousand words, but it’ll be better for everyone’s sanity if I only mention one or two.

So, there’s that famous scene where Supersonic lifts a barely three-dimensional steamroller out of Patricia’s way, like a real champ (if a real champ were a guy who cheats outrageously), with said steamroller having been built (probably in half an hour of somebody’s lunch break) either from very light wood (if you’re the more kindly minded type of thinker), or actual papier-mâché (if you’re more of a glass half empty kind of mutant). In any case, the great beauty of his scene is not just that the steamroller is clearly not a steamroller but how utterly shameless Simón is about it, obviously not caring one bit that his audience notices the extreme short cuts he’s willing to take. Curiously, in this film, that approach doesn’t look so much like a director looking down at his audience and his film than like a guy sharing a private moment with us.

As a second example, there are Gulik’s killer robots. They are silver, they have tasteful little glowing lamps, they have tiny rockets, they have in-built flame-throwers, they have in-built gas-throwers, they are so fast (cough) they can move at least three or four meters a minute (Simón already training for Slugs?), and they look exactly like giant toy robots. In fact, they look and feel exactly like what an eight year old would find awesome in a robot, so again, Simón seems to know what he’s doing with them.

These robots, as well as the film’s approach to special effects, also suggest to me that, while the film is clearly meant to rip-off the Donner Superman film, Simón is actually working off the much older serial model for Supersonic, something that also explains the film’s stop and start episodic plotting, the archetypal characters, and the way the action scenes are staged just as well, perhaps even better, than mere ineptitude would. One might even start to think there’s no ineptitude involved here at all but a rather clever and private revival of an often forgotten style of filmmaking hidden away in plain sight.


Or I just might be crazy, but then, so’s Dr. Gulik, and he gets all the best lines. Soon you will know the true force.

Three Films Make A Post: The First Motion Picture to be Called GORE-NOGRAPHY!!!

Pieces (1982): Despite being directed by Spain’s not worst but close enough director Juan Piquer Simón, this misbegotten product of a very bad night between the slasher and the giallo genres is unfortunately only seldom amusing with the crazy you’d hope for from its director - though it does include a handful of rather wonderful moments like a random kung fu attack, and Lynda Day George screaming “MONSTER! MONSTER!”). When it’s not sleazy and bloody in a pretty damn uninspired way, the film is often actually downright boring, spending way too much time on the decidedly unexciting police investigation of its murders and on the sexy adventures of a guy named Kendall who likes to wear cardigans, very much like a porn movie that doesn’t know what to do with itself when nobody’s fucking.

Diablo (2015): Lawrence Schoeck’s fine western would probably deserve a longer piece than this handful of sentences, but that kind of thing wouldn’t be doable without spoilers so egregious, they just might suck large parts out of the fun of a first viewing. Which doesn’t mean this is the sort of twist film you’ll only enjoy on first watching (the film does after all use his major turn quite a bit before the finale and does play fair enough you might realize what’s going on much earlier), but sometimes, a first impression is just too good to waste.

So let’s just say this is a clever and dark neo western that has a lot going for it: a clever script, some truly grim moments, beautiful photography, a very good very traditional for the genre soundtrack and Scott Eastwood in what isn’t as much of a stuntcasting decision as you’d expect.

Regression (2015): I rather like what Alejandro Amenábar is trying to do concerning the Satanic Panic of the 80’s and 90’s in the USA here, but in practice, his film never really worked for me. My problem is that I never actually found myself sharing in the increasing hysteria of Ethan Hawke’s character which turned that part of the film mostly irritating, and of course also undermined the film’s final act when the audience needs to share into Hawke’s feelings regarding the truth of the matter or will only very distantly appreciate the plot’s construction. As it stands, and despite some fine acting (Emma Watson’s ever-changing “American” accent notwithstanding) and Amenabár’s generally moody direction, I found myself watching the film with too much distance, kept away from its emotional core.

Cthulhu Mansion (1992)

Original title: La mansión de los Cthulhu

The gang of young hoodlums around one Hawk (Brad Fisher) has bitten off more than they can chew, and find themselves having to cope with the fallout from one dead security guard, as well as one dead drug dealer (and a bunch of stolen cocaine) that sets the police as well as some Very Bad People on their trail. One of their own (Luis Fernando Alvés) is hurt with one of those movie gunshot wounds of permanently fluctuating seriousness. Because the series of minor catastrophes happened at a carnival, they manage to “persuade” stage magician Chandu (Frank Finlay) – not that Chandu, we very much hope – to help them escape to his house, where they proceed to keep him, his daughter Lisa (Marcia Layton) and his mute servant hostage until they’ll get a better idea, which, given the lack of brain power in play here, might just take forever.

Alas, Chandu’s mansion is not the best place for this sort of thing, and soon the Evil Chandu keeps locked behind a door in the cellar becomes rather excited by the new company. Poltergeist phenomena, demonic possession and all sorts of shenanigans ensue.

If you’re going into Cthulhu Mansion by perhaps not Spain’s best director Juan Piquer Simón expecting either things Lovecraftian or a Chandu the Magician movie, you’ll be sorely disappointed. You see, Chandu’s mansion is actually called Cthulhu, because the mucky brochure (no compliments to the prop department for that one) that taught him true magic and cost his wife her life was simply entitled “Cthulhu”. Yup, the film didn’t even go for the Necronomicon there. Which is somewhat fitting, because the film’s idea of Evil is clearly one of the Christian demonic kind (what with it showing an allergy against crosses), and there’s nothing else having to do with Lovecraft (or even Derleth, for that matter) going on here at all.

Instead the film’s mostly concerned with being a very late attempt at ripping off the horror sub-genre of films – mostly from Italy and the USA - from the 70s where a bunch of more or less bad guys takes a group of (generally rich) people hostage in their own homes and does decidedly unfriendly things with them and crossing it with the cheesiest haunted house movie you could imagine. The former genre isn’t done much justice by a film that doesn’t seem to realize it is very belatedly trying to cash in on a sub-genre that thrives on nastiness and brutal social commentary and instead opts for keeping its hoodlums (you wouldn’t want to use a more modern word for these guys and gals) just mildly mean and very slightly brutal.

Simón does better by the cheesy haunted house movie, if your interpretation of better is “has a lot of furniture fly around, has some plants mumble, shows a woman drawn into a refrigerator by ridiculously awesome large claw hands, and includes more poltergeist nonsense than you can shake a stick at”. Add an idea of demonic possession that’s mostly about really icky looking skin, and adorably stupid death scenes, and you most certainly don’t have a decent, spooky, or whatever horror film. Instead, you get exactly the cheesy, stupid yet fun and pretty nonsensical kind of film you just might expect from Juan Piquer Simón. Despite missing my Lovecraft, I did find myself decently entertained by the brainless shenanigans.

On ExB: Supersonic Man (1979)

What can you say about Supersonic Man, a true classic of the superhero movie genre, if by classic you mean cheap and silly rip-off of a more popular movie?

Turns out quite a bit, as clicking through to my column over at the energetically pointing Exploder Button will demonstrate, though I’m not so much “saying” as writing a love letter there.

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