October 1st, 2012 
Dane Sager 
What The Film?! is a weekly column exclusive to Under The Gun Review that brings to light the plot holes Hollywood hoped you’d never notice. Written by comedy writer Dane Sager, this column shows no mercy to films that try and pull the proverbial wool over our eyes.
If you know a film with major plot holes that you feel needs to be exposed, tell us! Email utgjames@gmail.com with the subject “What The Film” and we’ll try to get your suggestion featured on the site.
This Week’s Movie: 1988’s SLUGS: THE MOVIE
Know what today is? Today is the first day of October! Now all the Halloween decorations you see at Target that went up in mid-August don’t seem so out of place! Now is a time for spooky stories, apple orchards, and Halloween parties! This October will be the third consecutive Halloween where I’ll be unable to convince my girlfriend to watch the Evil Dead movies. Has anyone decided on their costumes yet?
This year, I’m planning on going as the Douche King of Asshole Mountain
Upon first inspection, you would assume that maybe “SLUGS” was an acronym, maybe some sort of Special Lamda Underground Generator for Science. It’s really the addition of the subtitle “The Movie” that really sells the picture. This isn’t SLUGS: The Musical or SLUGS: The Table-Top Pen & Paper RPG, no, this is the big one. This is SLUGS: The Movie. It’s a movie about slugs.
Hey, 2006’s Slither was awesome! Maybe this will be too!
The movie opens with a couple on a rowboat. “So, you weren’t kidding when you said we were going fishing!?” the girl pleads, despite being able to ask this question at literally any point leading into them going fishing. Perhaps she’s just a bit slow and it wasn’t till she saw her boyfriend actual start to fish did she realize what was going on. The boyfriend is promptly pulled of the boat and underwater, his last words being “Hey, there’s something slimy down there. I don’t like it”.
It’s not so much the poor writing that really makes this movie great, it’s the worse acting and poor direction. The next scene introduces us to a clearly retarded man who reads his eviction notice out loud to no one in the room, because apparently him offering his dog rum and looking like a homeless person wasn’t enough to emphasis how bad this guy’s life is. He lays down on the couch (just out of frame) where he yells “NO. Don’t eat me!” before cutting away.
We’re introduced to the whole cast of characters, who are all more two dimensional than Paper Mario. As the movie progresses, we learn that the people in the town are being killed off by a swarm of black slugs that have become mutated from toxic waste. Can you think of a creature that could have been a better mutated monster than slugs? The correct answer to that is literally any other animal. Swarms of slugs aren’t scary. Everyone could just keep salt with them at all times.
Ants, that would have been a scary one.
Mike Brady is the only character who knows what’s going on and came up with a plan to stop it, but the fact that he believes that it’s killer slugs obviously gets him laughed out of any sort of way to stop it. This is where the movie falls into the plot line of a typical disaster movie where there’s one guy who knows what’s going on but is never listened to, but finally is respected only after a lot of people die.
There is a sequence where Pam, a female lead gets almost raped by a clearly villainous male who through cruel irony, gets killed by the slugs. Wait, no. Pam dies from the slugs shortly after and the rapist gets away and has absolutely no punishment for his actions.
A similar scene shows up in 1993’s Troll 3 as well as 2010’s Toy Story 3 where Lotso’s gang that rules everyone with an iron fist switch sides and become friends with everyone once Lotso gets taken care of. I understand that realistically, not all stories have closure or dramatic endings, but these aren’t true stories. They’re fictional and written specifically to entertain people. It’s hard to enjoy a movie when there are loose ends that are never resolved, such as a rapist who’s free or a chimpanzee in a RoboCop helmet running around with a gun.
Lotso’s men should be tried for war crimes.
Ultimately, Mike’s plan gets put into action to destroy all the slugs by, well, destroying the town. Almost the entire city goes up in flames, but hey, at least they destroyed all the slugs, right? No. They didn’t. I understand that you have to leave room open for a sequel, but nothing they did amounted to anything ever. There’s still a rapist out there and a bunch of slugs that want to murder people. The movie could have followed a guy in a completely different state as he spent those few days drinking liquor and playing Zelda 2: The Adventure Of Link while struggling to eat and not get Cheeto dust on his controller. Nothing would have happened and it would have had the exact same amount of impact on the situation as everything else in the movie.
Is Link fighting Banjo and Kazooie in this screen shot?
Dane is currently in production on several large-scale projects! You can follow him on Tumblr and Twitter!
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