And that’s okay.

The beginning is just the tip of the tongue and cheek sandwich. Richard Dreyfuss has re-donned his Matt Hooper rumpled scientist togs from Jaws down to the glasses, and goes about re-creating the classic moment—in a boat, all alone, on a vast body of water, singing “Show Me the Way to Go Home.”

A seismic rumble cracks open an underground cavern—”You mean a lake under the lake?” asks Sheriff Julie Forester. Why, yes, —one that is filled with prehistoric piranhas. If I get my science correct, that means that basically these bad boys are the scary dino-version of our modern-day nibblers, which essentially means they are even uglier and angrier and and bigger and remarkably precise. They can, for instance, remove a bikini top without drawing blood, though they do invariably go back for the kill.

If you’re in the market to see a movie like Piranha 3D, you’re probably not expecting Oscar nominations, despite the cast’s pandering to the Academy in the hilarious For Your Consideration video. No, if you’re going to see Piranha 3D, you’re in the market to see Lake Havasu Spring Break get turned into a meat grinder. And you won’t be disappointed. The movie may be the bloodiest movie ever made. No, literally, the production apparently burned through an obscene 7,000 gallons of fake blood, and had tanker trucks on set filled with the crimson liquid. Add that to the masterful work of effects team Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger, whose shredded body parts look so realistic, the film was banned from being shown at the 2010 Comic-Con.

And then there’s the second most important reason to see Alex Aja’s latest gore-fest: nudity. This is definitely a man’s movie. Let me rephrase that, this is every horny teenager’s wet dream. You don’t just get choice boobage from the likes of Kelly Brook and a vast array of other hot college girls, you get to see everything literally pop out at you in 3D!

And last but not least, we get to the cast. Look, churning a lake full of half-naked party chicks into fish bait isn’t nearly as fun when it’s a cast of nobodies. Thankfully, Aja has populated his film with a lot of familiar faces. We get Elisabeth Shue as the headstrong town sheriff, Ving Rhames as her ass-kicking deputy, Jerry O’Connell as a sleazy Joe Francis ripoff that gets all the best lines in the movie, Christopher Lloyd as an aquarium owner who’s nuttier than Doc Brown, and even Eli Roth as a wet t-shirt contest emcee. TV stars Jessica Szohr and Steven R. McQueen get thrown in the mix.

Whether the acting is good or bad is neither here nor there, all you need is for the performances to be believable enough to enjoy the ride. Luckily enough, the cast does one better and adds an extra layer to an otherwise campy horror premise, while Aja’s use of 3D redefines the term “eye-popping”, though not because the stereoscopic conversion is really stellar.

Piranha 3D is quite fun, especially in the thick of it. It’s unfortunate, though, that the third act lacks a sense of urgency. But again, let’s check the list: popcorn, soda, brain on “off”. Okay, it gets a pass … but still, it could have been more exciting.

If you can get past the flaws scattered throughout, it’s a great flick to watch with a bunch of your friends on one of the final weekends of the summer. It’s damn fun, and off the hook bloody. All good, clean R-rated 3D fun. Or an attempt in that direction.

Woo’s classic Hong Kong films with tough-guy titles like Bullet in the Head and Hard Boiled featured intense, focused, almost balletic contemporary gangster shootouts that seemed to redefine what these kinds of movies could do.

Though it stars Woo regular Tony Leung, Red Cliff, by contrast, is a both throwback and change of pace, a massive historical epic that used four writers, three editors, two directors of photography, 300 horses and a cast and crew that came close to 2,000. And oh, how it is epic.

Loosely based on the 14th-century Chinese novel “Romance of the Three Kingdoms,” which recounts events in the waning Han dynasty more than a millennium earlier, the film has one of the most familiar of war movie or western setups: the outnumbered good guys scheming to defeat a vastly larger force. In this case, though, the good guys, a pair of small southern China kingdoms whose forces are led by the viceroy Zhou Yu, number in the tens of thousands, and the bad guys, the Han army led by the megalomaniacal general Cao Cao, in the hundreds of thousands. Cao Cao wants to nip these potential insurgencies in the bud, but though the southern leaders soon combine their forces, he professes to be unconcerned.

“A loser joins forces with a coward,” he snarls, “What can they accomplish?”

Needless to say, he is about to find out.

Woo has always had a knack with action, and this movie is no exception: The hand-to-hand combat that takes up a good portion of the film is exciting and well-executed. Perhaps even more impressively, Mr. Woo takes the time to show how the battle plans of Zhou and Zhuge come together. There is an emphasis on strategy that you don’t often see in the sword-and-sandal-epic genre; the most entertaining sequence might come at sea without a single blow traded as Zhuge captures 100,000 of his enemies’ arrows

One thing that hasn’t changed since 1992 is the reassuring presence of the aforementioned Leung, one of the world’s last true matinee idols. His combination of Zen-like calm and wild expressiveness, centered in his pixieish eyes, serves equally well whether he is playing the tortured aesthete for Wong Kar-wai, the murderous bureaucrat for Ang Lee or the action hero for Mr. Woo. Not even body armor and an ancient helmet, let alone a cast of thousands, can contain him.

The computer-generated imagery that makes so much of the movie possible is served up in heaping, state-of-the-art helpings, and the results occasionally slip into the cartoonish. At the same time, Red Cliff is a classic tale that gets a classicist’s treatment. And it’s a triumphant return for the grand old man who, once upon a time in Hong Kong, made A Better Tomorrow, but can still show the fantasy/action boys how it’s done.

And, most of all, the film collects a cast of performers who know how to be funny. The success of this movie, following a formula upheld by just about any recent hit comedy you can name, lies as much with supporting players and plot-derailing set pieces as with the central story and characters. Jemaine Clement as a pompous, goatish artist; Zach Galifianakis as an I.R.S. flunky who believes he has the power to control other minds; Lucy Punch as a lovestruck stalker with no control over anything: these are the people who propel the movie on its meandering, offbeat path toward a madly farcical climax followed, inevitably and less happily, by a soft and sentimental dénouement.

Tim Conrad, played by Paul Rudd, is sick of his job. Slumming on the sixth floor of his investment firm, he hopes to land an office on the much more fashionable seventh. During his daily meeting, he blurts out an idea involving a rich Swiss magnate and captures his boss’s interest. In order to prove himself, Tim is invited to a monthly dinner where the other members of the office elite get together. Each brings a “special” guest to the meal, and whoever discovers the biggest loser wins the honors. If he can find a true moron, he has a chance of landing that promotion. While his beloved Julie, an art gallery owner, thinks it’s cruel, Tim believes he has found the perfect dolt in government underling Barry Speck, a weirdo who (played by Steve Carell) likes to build dead mouse dioramas. Little does he know that within a scant couple of days, this meek man with a good heart will totally unscramble his life-and give him some much needed perspective. D’awwwwwww.

There is some hypocrisy in the way Barry is treated: you are invited to laugh at him for more than 90 minutes and then implicitly chided for having done so, as the tables are turned, the self-satisfied winners are shown to be the real losers, and Tim’s nice-guy instincts come out on top. The job of finessing this contradiction falls mainly to Carell, who rises to the task by finding a new, or at least newish, way to be at once creepy, endearing, obnoxious and forgiving.

Without this well-meaning, mentally “different” man and his mice-inspired vision, Dinner for Schmucks would be just another abysmal Hollywood attempt at translating a foreign laughfest. And unfortunately, it’s kind of like that. When you walk away from the movie, you may not actually remember the majority of everything that happened. At times, the films’s not a great movie, or even a coherent one, but in nearly every scene it draws laughter from an impressively eclectic array of sources, both obvious and new. People fall down, things break, funny accents are used, crazy misunderstandings occur, and an impressively high number of witty, bizarre and outrageous lines are uttered. It is less a full-scale comic feast than a buffet of amusing snacks, and while it does not necessarily exalt or flatter your intelligence, it doesn’t treat you like an idiot, either. But with Carell’s Barry, it’s great, and he definitely helps that mission of memory.

You’re still here. Why are you still here?

Go.

NOW, I SAID.

Okay, fine, click the jump to read more words from me about it.

I’m not going to go very in depth about the plot and story of the movie, as that’s better served by you discovering it yourself while watching it. As such, this may not be the longest of reviews. Live with it and go see the movie.

Having come up with the idea when he was 16, director Christopher Nolan wrote the first draft of Inception eight years ago and in the interim his great success with Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, not to mention the earlier Memento, put him in a position to cast Leonardo DiCaprio and six other Oscar-nominated actors and spend a reported $160 million in a most daring way.

Aesthetically, Inception is beautiful. Before being called a visionary, Nolan obtains strongly the title of an astute and well respected aesthete. His creation of a multi-layered dream world is breathtakingly immense, even usurping the immensity of The Dark Knight. The architecture of a particular dream world is bristling with fascinating detail that, in a cinematic way, proves to be indispensable. When we see Parisian buildings being folded on top of each other, trains traveling recklessly through congested streets, and men fist fighting in a hotel corridor where gravity is obsolete one realizes these miraculous violations of natural law and we dare not question them because we are embedded within a world of no limitations; a world of dreams. It is not impossible for us to revel in this surreal atmosphere.

The selection of Oscar-winning French actress Marion Cotillard as Mal typifies the care Nolan has taken to cast these thriller roles for emotional connection, a move which pays off in the scenes she shares with DiCaprio. In addition to the impeccably professional Batman veterans Caine and Murphy, the film is also on the money with the smaller roles, including Pete Postlethwaite as Fischer’s ailing tycoon father and Tom Berenger as one of his key associates.

The reason all these diverse elements successfully come together is Nolan’s meticulous grasp of the details necessary to achieve his bravura ambitions. A filmmaker so committed he does his own second unit direction, Nolan is one of the few people able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads. Because he’s been so successful, Nolan, like Clint Eastwood, has been able to return again and again to the same creative team, which includes exceptional director of photography Wally Pfister, sharp-eyed editor Lee Smith and composer Hans Zimmer, whose propulsive score helps compel the action forward. Incapable of making even standard exposition look ordinary, Nolan is especially strong in creating the stunts, effects and out-of-the-ordinary elements whose believability characterizes this film as they did his previous Batman efforts.

Movies are created much like the dreams in Inception. They start as simple concepts in one individual’s head. Yet to wind up on the screen at your local megaplex, they require a team of hundreds, if not thousands, to put together. Getting things absolutely right requires a bit of magic – “Inception” has that quality. I can’t imagine how Nolan and his team felt the first time they screened the final cut. It had to feel like……

Wait for it…

A dream.

It’s not the type of war that you see in the Transformers movies, where you have two sides fighting a civil war, though differing philosophies are part of the reasons behind the battle.

It’s not a war between two equally matched sides. No, this is definitely more of a David versus Goliath type of battle.

To tell the truth, this war isn’t even one with blood. That is, unless you subscribe to the “money is everything” theory seen most prominently during the eighties. In that case, something’s being bled dry.

What we have right here are Beer Wars.

Beer Wars is a documentary that provides a behind-the-scenes examination of the ultra competitive beer industry. Director Anat Baron, former General Manager of Mike’s Hard Lemonade, reveals the obstacles small breweries must overcome to make their mark in an industry dominated by an evil empire of mega breweries.

The documentary reviews a brief history of the beer industry in America over the past century. Highlights include Prohibition, the rise of TV advertising, the decline of the local brewery, and the emergence of the three mega breweries – Anheuser-Busch, Miller Brewing, and Coors Brewing Company (movie filmed before recent mergers). This is the real story of beer in America–how it went from good to bad, and how demand for good beer is changing the market once again. If you like cold hard facts and random statistics, this movie is for you.

The movie gives a slanted view that portrayed the small, independent brewers in a positive light, while making Anheuser-Busch look like it was run by Satan himself. The slanting is to be expected though, as most all documentaries tend to take a viewpoint and run with it. The rare (and boring) ones are the totally independent ones. Slanted or not, though, the movie makes a valuable point-the market should determine what sells. If consumers want Bud, give them Bud. If they want Stone Arrogant Bastard, they should get as much Arrogant Bastard as Stone can brew. However, the three-tiered distribution system puts an unnatural skew on the availability of certain beer in certain markets. These distributors are influenced more by the big beer manufacturers than they are by the consumers.

Beer Wars definitely opened my eyes to the challenges that micro and craft brewers face when taking on the mega breweries. The cost of one commercial airing during the Super Bowl outweighs the typical marketing budget of a micro brewery for an entire year. That’s big money. This is a movie that all beer drinkers should watch.

The six main characters each wake up mid-air as they hurtle towards the ground. Their parachutes open, they grumble and stumble on this strange new terrain and lo and behold all bar one happen to be well practiced murderers cut from different killer cloths. There’s a death row criminal, a mercenary, a Yakuza, a US soldier and so forth. Anybody familiar with the Saw franchise should recognize this as a distinctly Jigsawian situation: it’s as if the grisly “do you want to play a game?” trap maker decided to teach a bunch of a-holes a lesson and hired some very freakin’ ugly alien things to do his dirty work. Realizing they’re prey for one helluva round of skirmish, these marked men (plus one obligatory chick) grudgingly work together – and, as these things go, get killed together. Cypress Hill said it all: when da ship goes down, you better be ready. You better be ready.

Adrien Brody leads the cast as Royce, a mercenary with a black heart and a passion for killing. Brody is solid and you’d hardly expect some ex-black ops mercenary to be some muscle bound thug, a la Schwarzenegger, but as with all films of this sort the actor is only as good as the material. For the most part, Predators isn’t hurt by character development or silliness as much as it suffers from a lack of intensity. Nothing seems new or interesting and the excitement meter rarely jumps. Sure, we are on an alien planet, but unless you’re working on par with Pandora we are going to need a little more than gooey flowers to stimulate the imagination.

For all the movie’s highs, the movie’s large cast causes problems. Taking a hard-R approach, the Predators need characters to be the occasional victims, but this leaves many of the stranded human killers feeling ancillary and superfluous. From the very start it’s obvious where the line of demarcation between survivors and victims lays, and while it’s endlessly entertaining to watch the alien hunters do what they do best, it would have been useful to get to know these people before we watched them slaughtered.

Don’t expect too much from the final action-packed ET-whooping finale, but it isn’t a total cop out either. Fans of the original movie (forget the subsequent cash-ins) will leave Predators satisfied but more than likely a whisker underwhelmed. Their first and loudest criticism should be the near total absence of one of the key elements of the original: the snappy, snigger-inducing junky one-liners. A writer who could’ve penned two or three corkers would’ve been worth a screenwriting credit and a cool 100K, easy. Anyone who doubts that logic needs simply to revisit this timeless exchange from the original between Poncho (Richard Chaves) and Blain (Jesse Ventura). Simple? Yes. Gloriously effective? You betcha.

Poncho: You’re bleeding man. You’re hit.
Blain: I ain’t got time to bleed.

And there’s not a lot on this earth that’s worse, cinematically speaking, than Miss March.

Now we have Derrick Comedy, an internet sensation full of gentlemen whose names all begin with a “D,” though curiously, none named Derrick. Whether you find this clever or stupid will help determine whether or not you will enjoy Mystery Team. Going by this scale, however, it pleases me to no end that Mystery Team is a rather clever and hysterically funny movie with its heart in the right place that potentially puts the Derrick boys at least on track with the Broken Lizard fellas.

Mystery Team is a film about a group of former Encyclopedia Brown-type child-detectives who have yet to grow up and are still solving stupid crimes during their senior year of High School. When an 8-year-old hires the team to solve a case of her parents double murder, the Mystery team must face the first adult case in the team’s history. The movie is incredibly well written and Derrick Comedy has perfectly captured the feeling of reading an Encyclopedia Brown type mystery on acid. The characters are all well developed, the performances on level of “the not ready for primetime players”, a compelling story, and laugh out loud moments at every turn. But I was most impressed in the film’s cinematography, which tries much harder than any other sketch comedy film that I’ve ever seen before. It is the difference between feeling like Reno 911 and feeling like an actual movie (albeit, shot on digital video).

A lot of the comedy comes forth from the characters reacting to strange new situations. Donald Glover, from NBC’s Community, takes the lead role of Jason with a perverse glee and ignorance that truly is bliss. He wants to continue solving mysteries for the rest of his life, with his chums by his side no matter how practical that might be. His companions D.C. Pierson and Dominic Dierkes are just a bit more practical, but alongside the same skill level and are no less hilarious. There are a lot of familiar faces that support the able leads, many of whom can be found on NBC’s Thursday night comedy line up including the lovely Aubrey Plaza in the “femme fatale” role of this particular mystery.

The screenplay, also handled by Pierson, Dierkes and Glover is at times razor sharp: no sloppy improv here. Some of the film’s best lines are throwaways. At an office party that’s crashed, one middle manager wearily tells another who is behaving badly that “sometimes I wish you didn’t beat cancer, I really do.” If you don’t pause the movie to then break out into laughter after hearing that line, I don’t know what’s wrong with you.

The problem with making a feature is that sooner or later you have to tend to plot, and even at 98 minutes, the movie feels padded at times. First-time director and troupe member Dan Eckman films each scene as pragmatically as possible, and that doesn’t help make things constantly flow. On the plus side, Saturday Night Live cast member Bobby Moynihan has a few good scenes as the local snitch, an even bigger loser than the heroes, and the comic chemistry between Glover, Pierson, and Dierkes is tight.

The film is a true labor of love of the performers and the hard work and good times show on the screen. Given how hard I laughed during the entire running time, I’d say they succeeded. Like all good comedies, Mystery Team has a heart. Kooky mayhem aside, this is a tale of three friends struggling to face the reality of growing up. Through this, the film finds a nice balance of good story, good action and great humor.

Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July is not an adaptation of the memoir by Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic, though that’s what the credits indicate. It’s most certainly based on it, but it’s not necessarily an adaptation of the memoir. It’s an indulgent style showcase for Stone, who, with his longtime cinematographer Robert Richardson, employs every act of film trickery imaginable that doesn’t involve CGI effects.

Tom Cruise is thoroughly convincing in each phase — from the sweet, shy, starry-eyed teenager with romantic notions of fighting for his country and becoming a war hero; to a quickly disillusioned Marine struggling with the conflicts between warfare and his Catholic morals; to a proud, wounded veteran determined to have a positive attitude in the face of unfriendly ’60s protesters and his family’s sadness; to a self-pitying paraplegic; and finally, to an active spokesperson fighting against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam war.

The first part of the film is a bit over the top: the soundtrack is incredibly hokey and the family dynamics are so idyllic that I longed to hear a curse word, to see a cat have a tin can tied to its tail, an alcoholic parent stumbling over furniture — anything. One could argue that these scenes are filmed as nostalgic memories of a lost utopia, or one could just conclude that they’re overdone. It’s difficult to imagine that someone’s reality could be as squeaky-clean as a Leave It to Beaver episode, but maybe some people of Kevin’s generation would swear that that’s exactly how it was.

Once in Vietnam, this goody-goody-two-shoes background serves to make the war scenes even more harrowing. Cruise seems more innocent, vulnerable, and just plain younger than the boys in The Deer Hunter, so much so that the exigencies of combat seem even crueler. Stone’s film is a well-executed drama that involves a man fighting to find himself and to come to terms with the choices he has made.

This elegiac idealism, where young men cry when they lose wrestling matches and where God only cares for the man who serves his country, is subverted when Kovic must fight in the lands surrounding the Cua Viet River. Here, accidents are bound to happen, and the confusion of war rips apart innocent lives. This middle-section of the film moves quickly and ends with Kovic lying in a military hospital. Crippled and shell-shocked, he clings to his shattering idealism and demands that people give him the respect he believes he deserves.

The Stone we have learned to love and hate emerges fully in the third section of the film, in which he is in complete control of Kovic’s transformation. Stone nicely contrasts Kovic’s liberalizing deterioration with the changing political climate that marked the shifting of power between the Kennedy and Nixon administrations. Kovic desperately tries to believe that there is logic to the pain he suffers, but concludes that he was nothing more than a pawn in an ill-conceived political scheme.

Once Kovic is forced to think about the state of American politics, it’s completely downhill from there – even if the journey becomes a tad overlong. From a battlefield of dying Americans and Vietnamese to the homeland battle against misplaced idealism, Kovic’s journey continues as a battle toward godlessness. From young dreamer to broken soldier, Kovic’s journey is startling and ironic; a vision that could only have been imparted by hands as gentle and powerful as those of Oliver Stone.

Happy Fourth of July, everyone.

Mos Def stars as Mike, a sweet, shy guy who has worked all his life at Be Kind Rewind, the video and junk store owned by his surrogate father Mr. Fletcher. He reluctantly pals around with Jerry, who works at the junkyard down the street and holds a strange vendetta against a nearby electrical plant. On the weekend when Mr. Fletcher leaves town to research other video stores in nearby New York that have switched to DVD, Jerry becomes accidentally magnetized when an attempt to sabotage the electrical plant goes wrong. As soon as Jerry steps into Be Kind Rewind, he accidentally erases all the tapes in the store.

Batty neighbor Miss Falewicz is taking calls from Mr. Fletcher each night to keep him up to date on the store, so when she asks Mike and Jerry for a copy of Ghostbusters, they panic. Unable to get another copy, they decide to reshoot it themselves—“I’m Bill Murray, you’re everybody else,” Jerry tells Mike—figuring she’s never seen the original anyway. Their version takes place entirely in the local library and is 20 minutes long, but when some of the thuggish guys in the neighborhood get a look at it, they want more.

Jerry makes up the term “sweding” for what they do to films like Rush Hour, King Kong and even 2001: A Space Odyssey, establishing a miniature local film industry with the help of a dry cleaner employee (Melonie Diaz) and neighborhood residents. The fun is interrupted, though, by the classic bigwigs in suits, who want to tear down Be Kind Rewind and build a cleaned-up downtown area. Mike decides that, to save the neighborhood, they will band together to make a movie about Fats Waller, the jazz musician who is Mike’s hero.

On paper, it sounds eccentric, but this is all part of Gondry’s vision. He presents us with a film whose simple structure could have tripped from the tongue of any vacuous pony-tailed studio exec (a community coming together to save a dilapidated video shop? It could only have come from the ’80s!). But Gondry uses this premise to flip open the ribcage of cinema and allow us to peruse its blood, bones and sinew, and really see how they flow, fit and flex into a glorious whole.

The magnitude of Gondry’s visual ingenuity is consistently jaw-dropping: with the aid of some washing machine innards and a white jump suit, he manages to reduce the iconic rotating space station scene from 2001 to a kind of cinematic primordial ooze, at once presenting the infinite potential of the camera to create, subvert and renew reality while also screaming, ‘Yes, you can do this too!’

It goes without saying that this is a naïve, utopian point of view. The travestied films in Be Kind Rewind are the intellectual property of large corporations, and you can be sure that teams of lawyers were consulted and paid before the Sweding went very far. But the movie hardly pretends otherwise. Instead it treats movies as found objects, as material to be messed around with, explored and reimagined. It connects the do-it-yourself aesthetic of YouTube and other digital diversions with the older, predigital impulse to put on a show in the backyard or play your favorite band’s hits with your buddies in the garage.

And the deep charm of the film is that it allows the audience to experience it with the same kind of casual fondness. It is propelled by neither the psychology of its characters nor the machinery of its plot, but rather by a leisurely desire to pass the time, to see what happens next, to find out what would happen if you tried to re-enact Ghostbusters in your neighbor’s kitchen. It’s inviting, undemanding and altogether wonderful. Be Kind Rewind is one of many movies out there that display just why I love film and movies so much. There’s a charm that just makes you feel good. You’ll want to see it again, or at least Swede it yourself.

If you’ve seen or heard anything for Slither, directed by James Gunn, any pictures from some of its gross-out moments, you pretty much have a solid idea of what it’s all about: fun, horror and really gross stuff. If you enjoy those elements, as well as homages to cool horror flicks of the past, the typical 50s “small town” set-up, mixed in with some memorable dialog (with the best clearly being unprintable) and enjoy the acting stylings of Nathan Fillion, the great Michael Rooker and Gregg Henry, this film is sure to twinkle your horror toes, particularly if mutating monsters, slugs, zombies and really disgusting scenarios are your bag o’ chips. The film starts off with your typical small town set-up, establishing all of the characters slowly, but surely, and teasing us with some effects as the “alien” being lands in a field outside of town; however, once the extra-terrestrial being infects Rooker’s character, the fun really begins as he mutates and the fit hits the shan.

The rest of the cast compliments the material just as they should in a film like this. Elizabeth Banks gets the job done as Starla, the wife who picked the wrong night to not be in the mood. Gregg Henry steals every scene he’s in as he hams it up as the local mayor with a bad attitude. Michael Rooker, playing the tragically possessed jilted husband, under what appears to be a solid ton of rubber effects makeup, even appears to be having a good time. Gunn’s wife Jenna Fisher of NBC’s “The Office” turns up in a small role, and true to its stock and heritage, the film features cameos by Lloyd Kaufmann and Rob Zombie.

Icky but never overly bloody, Slither still manages to happily buck the trend of the PG-13 horror movie. Former St. Louisan Gunn made his way home for this screening, and graciously answered a bunch of questions after the film. He’s attested that this film was nothing short of a labor of love, paying homage to Cronenberg’s Shiver, as well as his Troma days of Tromeo & Juliet. He’s also discussed his usage of both practical puppet effects and CGI, both of which work well, but both of which were also greatly challenging to him as a director. Slither is just pure fun to watch and though it won’t go down in history as one of the better movies made, that’s its saving grace in that the movie doesn’t take itself too seriously.

I got exactly what I thought I was going to get from this movie, and maybe a little more as I really didn’t think the effects would be as effective as they were (most of them are practical, as opposed to CGI) and the dialog was also a lot funnier than I expected. I really don’t think movies like this will ever go out of style as there seems to always be some sort of yearning for the zombie movie. Yes, its fun to watch and yes it’s predictable. The actors might not always be familiar but really … so what? There are far worse movies out there that are trying to make a point and Slither is one that is best seen taken at face value. Check your mind at the door and sit back and enjoy.