Slither

Directed by Howard Zieff, Slither follows James Caan’s Dick Kanipsia as he finds himself caught up in a wild goose chase alongside a trio of peculiar figures (including Peter Boyle’s Barry Fenaka and Sally Kellerman’s Kitty Kopetzky). Filmmaker Zieff, working from W.D. Richter’s screenplay, kicks Slither off with an exceedingly oddball opening stretch that seems to promise an easygoing, lighthearted endeavor, with the movie’s agreeably off-kilter atmosphere perpetuated by its uniformly appealing performances and a periodic emphasis on laugh-out-loud funny asides and jokes. (There’s an amusing recurring bit, for example, wherein Dick answers the question of how another character died by saying simply, “bullets.”) It’s disappointing to note, then, that Slither peters out to a fairly palpable degree once it progresses into its meandering and often excessively quirky midsection and second half, as Zieff’s decidedly lackadaisical sensibilities result in an absence of forward momentum that becomes more and more difficult to overlook (ie the whole thing is eventually just excessively loose and relaxed). By the time the somewhat underwhelming climax rolls around, Slither has cemented its place as an almost passable piece of work that does, for the most part, feel like it should be so much better.

** out of ****