Slugs (1988)

Country of Origin: Spain

Trailer: 

*Spoilers Throughout*

What’s This About: Yuppies and dubbed Spanish citizens run afoul of homeless snails.

Here are some of my observations as I watched the film:

• I assume this is about the history of 12-gauge shotgun shells.
• Two young adults are in a fishing boat. The girl says, “This is boring,” which isn’t a good sign for the rest of the movie. The guy is fishing and has his foot in the water, and says, “There’s something slimy down there!” even though it’s a fucking lake and slimy things are its business. Thankfully, the slugs execute him for fishing without a license.
• This is supposed to be a production of the Kingdom of Spain, but so far these actors are as American as catastrophically bad decisions.
• I’m expecting some heavy-handed environmental message in this one, which is always the most enjoyable part of a horror movie.
• A disgusting old hoarder and his disgusting old dog fall prey to the slugs. If I had a silver slug for every time a vagabond died first in one of these schlock pictures, I’d be slightly richer than this gross old dirtbag.
• Here are some yuppies in the world’s lamest bar that looks like the lobby of a Best Western, where they’re drinking beers out of wine glasses. Don’s wife, Maria, looks like his great-great-great-great-grandmother who died during the Inquisition.
• We were just introduced to so many new yuppie characters my head is spinning. I wouldn’t have even remember Maria’s name if I didn’t just write it down to comment that she looks like the Fabulous Moolah with her life force drained by a space vampire.
• The music in this so far is the most delightful thing my ears have ever smelled. It’s like it was unused from an unaired ’80s pilot about superhero dogs.
• So all three yuppie guys we were just introduced to looked exactly the same, and I have no idea which one this is, who seems like he’ll be the main protagonist. They’re calling him Brady, so I will do the same.
• Brady and the sheriff find the eaten hoarder guy. I like that there are worms crawling on what’s left of his face, even though he’s inside.
• Brady is the health inspector? Why exactly did they bring him in to look at a hoarder’s corpse?
• Mike Brady??? The architect??? What a bunch of shit.
• Still nothing even remotely Spanish about this at all. AT ALL! Too late to turn back now.
• Brady’s wife, Kim, is a high school teacher the kids call “Wicked Bitch” because she dares to assign them homework and quizzes.
• Ok this old couple in the greenhouse are clearly dubbed Spanish actors, so we’re good.
• The gardener tells his wife the white orbs on the plants are slug eggs, but he makes no effort to remove them.
• Anyway slugs get in his gardening glove, so he has to chop his own hand off, which is fun, but then the greenhouse explodes, so he went through all that hand chopping effort for nothing.
• They keep commenting how big these slugs are, and I guess they are big, but not all that big.

Slimy Slug Shakma Syndrome

• This beautiful woman who is also a full-blown alcoholic and also Spanish at least is chopping up some lettuce with a full slug inside and she doesn’t notice it whatsoever.
• I like that Kim was wearing the most sexless outfit imaginable earlier and now she’s running around in a white tank top.
• It is kind of a fun game trying to ascertain which actors are Spanish and which aren’t. I mean, it’s not that difficult, but still fun. Ok, it’s not that fun, either.
• Ok, the drunk and her husband ate that god damn lettuce. They didn’t taste slug or realize the sluggish texture? There was no weird slug smell? I get that she was too hammered, but what’s the husband’s excuse?
• The delightful superhero dog music is gone, now replaced with porn music from Vanessa Del Rio’s greatest hits video.
• This poor lab hamster is covered in a slug and keeps falling over. I don’t want to know what they did to achieve that effect. Most likely it involved the horrific death of that hamster.
• This horny teen who looks like Surfer Thor is also a drunk. He should bang that other drunk instead of his bitchy teen girlfriend.

Actually it’s Turtle from North Shore. Shaka! Shakma??

• No matter how lustfully horny or lustfully drunk they were you’d think they would have noticed the bedroom floor was covered in slugs.
• So the drunk’s husband is out at lunch and he starts bleeding profusely and his face melts off, and there are the worms again. I don’t get the worm thing.

Talk about a Bloody Mary!

• I also don’t get why Brady the town health inspector is so involved in these gory matters.
• Oh they actually explain the worm thing! They’re blood flukes, parasites that appear in the blood of slugs, like some politicians.
• So the slugs are eating people, and also, on top of that, the flukes are infecting people and making them melt from the inside? How about one more thing? Like the flukes have an even tinier bug in them that turns people into zombies?
• Brady’s wife frantically calls him because there are slugs in their kitchen sink. Why didn’t she just leave the house?
• I think the head of the water department is Solomon Grundy from the Superfriends.
• 80% of Brady’s character is barging into people’s offices. He also seems to be the only American actor directly interacting with the Spanish actors. I guess he was the only one they could afford to fly overseas. Basic economy class, no checked baggage, no assigned seating.
• I like how these two people, who just witnessed that guy’s face melt off at the restaurant, are now mocking the whole slug notion.
• Speaking of which, that guy’s drunk wife hasn’t appeared since. I assume she’s drinking sangria by the gallon offscreen.
• Sure the slug thing is bad, but it seems as long as you kept your eyes open for them, it wouldn’t be that big of a problem.
• I love that the scientist man has come up with a special acid to kill the slugs when they’ve tried literally no other method so far. I don’t get why they just don’t blanket the whole town in salt.

Sure now everyone is dead from high blood pressure but no more god damn slugs, I can tell you that.

• There’s a teen beer bust that will surely be busted up by slugs soon, and so far my favorite scene in the movie is a boy trying to force a girl to eat a slice of pizza.
• This is Halloween and the beer bust doesn’t seem like a costume party but that girl is dressed like she’s from Puritan times. Which I guess makes sense since she rebuffs her boyfriend’s sexy advances. Oh and the pizza freak tries to sexually assault her, so she goes down to the sewer, where the slugs have beer blasts.
• This climax of Brady and Don (one of the other faceless yuppies) running around in the slug sewers isn’t as thrilling as it sounds.
• oh no they got don oh god no
• So they blow up the sewers, which is probably going to fuck the town up just as much if not more than the slugs ever could dream of. At least there’s a good minute’s worth of things exploding.
• Oh yeah, there really was no reason for that teen beer blast, or Kim being called the Wicked Bitch, or that drunk’s drinking problem, or really anything at all, for that matter.

Final Thoughts: Drugs not slugs. While the slug scenes were pretty great, the rest was unironically slow moving. Maybe that was an artistic choice? But would anyone who doesn’t create schlock movie content have any reason whatsoever to watch this? I don’t believe slow. Recommended for mollusk maniacs, superhero dogs, Spanish-speaking horticulturalists, slimeballs, and drunks unaware of their surroundings.

How Spanish Is It?: It’s set in upstate New York, and there are a handful of dubbed Spanish people. No tapas or bullfighting in sight. 1% Tariff

Score: 3.5 Bottles of 90-proof Slug Slime (out of 10)