- Directed by Juan Piquer Simon
- Written by Ron Gantman, Shaun Hutson, Jose Antonio Escriva
- Stars Michael Garfield Levine, Kim Terry, Philip McHale
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 29 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wN94Jp1YwAE
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
This was a pretty low end creature feature. It’s got some good moments of kills and mayhem. Mostly it suffers from bad dialogue, overbearing music, weak acting, and choppy editing. It was just acceptable, not great.
Spoilery Synopsis
A young couple is out on a rowboat fishing. She’s bored and wants to go swimming, but something pulls him in and eats him first. Credits roll.
An old man and his dog sit next to an old house and get drunk. The man’s been living there, but he’s not much of a housekeeper and slugs are everywhere.
We cut to Mike and Kim Brady out with Maureen and her boring husband David. They pass Don and his wife, Maria, on the way out. Don is in charge of the city’s sewers. Mike and Kim go home and have a happy time. We see they have a slug on their window.
In the morning, Mike, the health inspector, talks to the sheriff about evicting the old drunk we saw earlier. They find the man’s head; something’s been eating him. Mike finds a bunch of little slime trails leading into the basement, but there’s nothing down there but trash.
Mike and Don check out a reported clogged sewer. Don finds something alive living in the pipes.
At school, the kids talk about Kim’s classes. They are annoying. An old woman nags her husband about the snail eggs on all her plants. He ends up getting bitten by a slug that’s hiding in his glove. He screams for help, but his wife is inside vacuuming with loud music. He cuts his own hand off before the entire greenhouse explodes in fire.
Kim and Mike hear about the old couples’ death, and Mike notices slime trails all through Kim’s garden. Then he sees the slug, and one of them bites him. He puts one in a jar to have it tested by the science teacher at Kim’s school.
Elsewhere, Maureen makes dinner, and we see her lettuce is moving. She chops up one of the slugs without seeing it, and they eat it. David gets stomach cramps after.
Mike and Kim take the slug to scientist John, who tells them all about slugs. They’re usually too small to eat meat, but these are way bigger than they should be. Later, John watches the slug eat a hamster; they aren’t supposed to do that.
A couple of students wait until her parents leave and then make out in the basement. We see their bathroom is covered in hundreds of slugs. As is the bedroom. Soon, the young couple is slug food.
The sheriff calls Mike to check out the dead teens in the morning. Mike says it could be killer slugs, and the sheriff laughs at him. Don calls Mike about the slugs in the sewer and the old toxic waste dump that the city is built over. He’s got a whole theory about toxic gas being released.
David is at an important business lunch and his head basically explodes as the millions of little slugs crawl out. Mike takes samples from David to John and discovers that the slugs are indeed carnivorous.
Kim calls Mike; she’s got slugs coming out her faucet. Mike goes to the mayor and demands all the water in town needs to be shut down. The mayor ignores him, turning on the faucet to see what comes out, which is… nothing.
John tells Mike about poison that will kill the slugs, but they need to get all the slugs in one place. As Mike, Don, and John get their plan in place, we cut to a teen Halloweeen party with dozens of kids there. Don and Mike wander around in the sewers for an interminable amount of time, eventually finding the main breeding ground. Things go badly, and Don is eaten.
Mike crawls out of the sewer and tells John to pump in the explosive poison, which blasts manhole covers and cars and storefronts and buildings all over town. Amusingly, after we see all those fires and explosions, multiple fire trucks pull up to where they are just standing there where there is no fire. Kim stops by to pick up Mike, leaving the sheriff to clean up the mess.
Naturally, we cut to one surviving slug down in the tunnels. It only takes one to breed a new batch…
Brian’s Commentary
Some of the dialogue here is truly awful, and a lot of it seems to have been dubbed in post, so there’s really no excuse. It was shot in both the USA and Spain, and that explains a lot of it. The music is overblown and way too active for such a slow-paced film.
There’s no way that plan would have killed all the slugs anyway. Other than the death of one random teen, all the talk about the big Halloween party goes nowhere; they don’t even know they’re in danger.
This movie is really, really dumb.
Kevin’s Commentary
I’d been led to believe this was a great horror movie. It is not. Like Brian mentioned, there were far too many slugs over too big of an area for that plan, or any plan, of destruction to work. Some would have survived most anything. It had some good moments, some gross practical effects, but it wasn’t a winner overall.