For the week of July 31st, Scream/Shout Factory is bringing James Gunn's comedy-horror-sci-fi mélange Slither to Blu-ray. These days, Gunn acts as the steward for the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise, but we must not forget he cut his teeth on splattery Troma features like Tromeo and Juliet, all of which helped influence this slightly more commercial-but-still-very gross homage to '80s chillers like Night of the Creeps and Society. For Slither, Gunn has an alien parasite land in small-town America and immediately infect powerful local businessman Grant Grant (Michael Rooker, Gunn's good-luck charm both here and in Guardians of the Galaxy). That Grant begins to mutate into some tentacled alien abomination is bad enough, but he also starts producing a horde of alien slugs that enter the human body by any means necessary and turn their human victims into flesh-hungry ghouls. Yep, it's that kind of movie, and you can sense Gunn's delight in using a mid-range Universal Studios budget for the sorts of grotesqueries Troma would produce with some ketchup and a lot of tinfoil. Grant's final form is legitimately revolting to behold, as is the fate of the unwitting "mate" (Brenda James) who plays host to the thousands of alien slugs. Yet "delight" is the key word here; Gunn couldn't make torture porn if he tried, and what sets Slither apart is how good-humored it is. Not good-natured, mind you - Gunn lets characters you wouldn't necessarily expect get violated in the worst ways possible (and if I find anything here unseemly, I might point to how Gunn constantly wields the threat of rape against his cast). But he does love his characters, and he gives them quirks you wouldn't expect, from the way Nathan Fillion cracks a Bill-Murray-esque deadpan in the face of certain doom to how Gregg Henry's sleazy town mayor never stops trying to hustle his constituents. Best of all is the relationship between Grant and his estranged wife Starla (the great Elizabeth Banks). As anyone who has seen Guardians of the Galaxy or his underrated Super can attest, Gunn infuses his genre works with honest emotionality when you least expect it, and he gets at something touching between the Grants. Grant was a terrible, neglectful husband before he was an alien beast; after he starts to change, he becomes set on world domination, but he also starts to appreciate Starla for the first time in a long time, and Rooker conveys so much pathos even when he is buried under layers of slime and awful fake teeth. Now, Grant's way of getting closer to Starla is probably more nauseating than just saying it with flowers, but love is a battlefield, baby. A very sharp little charmer.
Also from Shout Factory are steelbooks of three iconic John Carpenter thrillers. First up - chronologically speaking - is his 1980 chiller The Fog, which watches as ghost pirates (or is it pirate ghosts?) besiege a small Northern California with a disturbing past. In many ways, The Fog represents Carpenter in transition. He'd scored a massive success with 1978's slasher favorite Halloween, so you can't blame people for expecting more of the same here, except that's not really what The Fog wants to do. The lovely opening scene, which features the great John Houseman sitting at a campfire and telling a group of children spooky stories, sets the tone for what's most vividly a ghost story as opposed to a bunch of teens getting slaughtered. Yet you'd never mistake The Fog for something like Robert Wise's elegant haunted-house feature The Haunting: feeling the pressure to compete with more graphically inclined horror movies, Carpenter famously recut and reshot many of The Fog's scare sequences to include bloody violence. As such, the film seems to suffer an identity crisis in real time, swinging between careful suspense and strategic gore, and that tonal uncertainty leaves The Fog moving far less confidently than Carpenter's best features. However, what The Fog lacks in tonal coherence, it compensate with raw atmosphere. Carpenter and DP Dean Cundey create what looks like the most gorgeous EC Comic ever made - you bathe in the images here. Their 1981 follow-up, the action-thriller Escape from New York, isn't as visually stunning, but it's far more satisfying as a movie. The setup is classic grindhouse: take one part high-concept nonsense (it's the future - 1997! - and the President of the United States has crash-landed in a dystopian Manhattan) and mix in two parts scrappy filmmaking tricks (Carpenter shot most of the film in St. Louis, so don't expect a lot of familiar NYC landmarks). That said, Escape from New York remains one of Carpenter's most financially successful movies, and I credit two key elements. For one, Carpenter's direction is as muscular as the production design is threadbare, and his staging of action and placement of Cundey's eye go a long way towards convincing viewers they're watching a more substantial movie than they are. More importantly, he gets one of star Kurt Russell's greatest performances. Believe it or not, but in 1981 most people thought of Russell as the amiable Disney kid, and Escape from New York helped Russell take a sledgehammer to that family-friendly image. His Snake Plissken is a cowboy hat and some weather-beaten dusters away from occupying the exact same space as Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone's great Spaghetti Westerns; Plissken cuts such an imposing figure that Russell could have spent the rest of his career assaying violently competent badasses for Carpenter. Still, without Russell, Carpenter could still craft an engaging genre hero: vide his 1987 sci-fi satire They Live. Carpenter took a chance on then-WWF superstar Rowdy Roddy Piper to play his protagonist, an unnamed drifter who discovers a massive alien conspiracy on Earth, and the gambit proved successful. Piper is splendid in They Live, a swaggering, macho tough guy who's just self-aware enough to give the part a welcome layer of self-aware comedy - when he's firing off hardboiled one-liners ("I am here to kick ass and chew bubblegum, and I am all out of bubblegum") or engaging in ridiculously distended combat (the fist-fight between him and Keith David that goes on, and on, and on…), Piper always conveys the sense that he knows this material is ridiculous but loves it just the same. That goes double for Carpenter. They Live ranks as one of his funniest movies, and he approaches the humor as a necessary tool. For Carpenter, this film was an opportunity to criticize the conservative and capitalist mores of the 1980s, but his work never feels as strident as something by, say, Oliver Stone because Carpenter couches it in genre thrills and welcome gags. Carpenter knew that B-movies could excoriate society better than prestige pictures could - would that more filmmakers today took the same approach.
Finally, from Kino Lorber comes the cult thriller The Good Son, which was a mainstay on cable television. If you were a millennial of a certain age, it made for pretty irresistible viewing: watch cherub-faced Home Alone star Macaulay Culkin play a homicidal twelve-year-old, and one hell-bent on killing any perceived competitions for his parents' affections. Sure, Culkin inflicted some graphic violence on Home Alone's Wet Bandits, but he did so strictly within the realm of cartoon physics, whereas in The Good Son Culkin is skulking around a genuinely malevolent Ian McEwan script packed full of infanticide and psychological ennui. However, the idea of The Good Son proves more bracing than the finished film. I can't blame McEwan's writing, and director Joseph Ruben had such a fine sense of the domestic thriller in the 1980s and 1990s - his work on Sleeping with the Enemy and especially 1987's The Stepfather was often Hitchcockian in its building of suspense. Nope, in this case, Culkin is the albatross that fatally cripples whatever inherent potential The Good Son has. Culkin's own destructive relationship with his father/ex-manager Kit remains one of Hollywood's most unseemly true-life stories; the elder Culkin long used his son for self-serving purposes, and he essentially blackmailed Twentieth Century Fox into casting Macaulay in The Good Son, threatening to keep Macaulay from appearing in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York if Fox cast anyone else as The Good Son's heavy. Whether or not Macaulay wanted to appear in either feature never crossed Kit's mind, and my heart goes out to Macaulay: no child should ever be a studio bargaining chip. That said, he has no facility whatsoever at conveying menace, and The Good Son is at its most risible when Culkin is trying to scare people. With a more accomplished performer at the center, The Good Son might work. Ruben directs the hell out of this thing, and all of the supporting performances are great, with Wendy Crewson and Elijah Wood scoring top marks as Culkin's supportive mother and suspicious cousin, respectively. As is, though, it's just an unfortunate footnote.