Slither (1973)

(On Cable TV, November 2022) It’s not rare for me to watch a 1970s movie and become concerned about everyone who was alive back then. Granted, New Hollywood meant throwing standards of decency out the window and breaking the rules of crowd-pleasing narratives—but even given that trend, I often watch films of the period and wonder: were these people all right? (Hopefully, that’s what they’ll say watching films of our era.)  Slither is my latest example, because it seems determined to be an anti-comedy—a film that shares a few superficial similarities with humour, but is more interested in perverting the elements of the genre than actually being funny. People start dying a few minutes in, the central quest turns out to be one shaggy-dog dead-end that comes accompanied with shaggy-puppy subplots that mock audiences’ expectations. It’s a road movie that goes nowhere, and a quirky character drama with people we don’t care about. It’s willfully determined not to reward audiences in any way, while wasting several good actors staring with a bemused James Caan. It’s a kind of film that Hollywood could not have made a decade earlier, and one that would be made far more infrequently once the genre returned to its entertainment roots a decade later. Underwhelming is too soft a word to describe Slither’s impact, because it seems unapologetic in being even less than that.