Slugs (1988) - Film Review

About as entertaining as a fart in a spacesuit, and no-where near as scary, Juan Piquer Simón’s 1988 horror SLUGS is about as terrifying as finding a fly in your soup!! So many reviews use the phrase ‘so bad it’s good’ let’s get his straight, SLUGS is not in any way good. There is little or no humour to be had and come on!! How scary can a very slow moving insect actually be?! Unless you are prepared to lie down in a pit and wait for a fortnight, I’d wager there is nothing to fear here!! One guy gets bitten by a slug in his glove and proceeds to throw himself around in such an outrageous manner that the end result is the destruction of his house, I’m serious, his whole house is gone!!! Why did he not simply remove his glove, along with the offending slug and get a plaster from the first aid cabinet?

The acting is way beyond poor, the screenplay diabolical and the cinematography a joke. There is some gore and a few grisly, if a tad ridiculous deaths, but not enough to redeem the ludicrous idea
of killer slugs. Slugs was doomed for failure from the moment that silly idea was conceived. Excruciating for all the wrong reasons and one of those films that begs the question; how the hell did it ever get made!

I look around and I see people enjoying this ‘so bad it’s good’ film and it’s than that I realise, my expectations must have been too high. You see, I wanted to be absorbed, scared, and entertained and what I got was bored, frustrated, and bemused. Risk it if you want, watch this horrifyingly bad film, see if it really is ‘so bad it’s good’. But if it’s not, don’t come crying to me, begging for 90 minutes of your life back.

SLUGS (1988) Director: Piquer Simón. Writer: José Antonio Escrivá, Ron Gantman, Juan Piquer Simón, Shaun Hutson (Novel). Cast: Michael Garfield, Kim Terry, Philip MacHale, Alicia Moro...

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