So instead of taking a really good story from probably the best-selling and most famous horror author of all time and making it a movie with some legendary Hollywood talent attached to it, they decided to take a crappy novel from a British author (who has an apparently huge and if so, undeserved ego), little known in the states, and have it made into an even crappier movie by a no-talent no-name Spanish director whose only claim to fame is being made fun of on "Mystery Science Theater 3000" ten years later. Is it me, or are you getting the feeling that it had less to do with “Roger doesn’t want to make a rat picture” than it did with, “Roger doesn’t want to pay the kind of money you have to pay Stephen King and Tom Savini because they have actual talent”?

Both stories follow Health Inspector Mike Brady and his buddy Sewer Inspector Don Palmer, as they try to figure out why there are suddenly hordes of giant man-eating slugs running around in the sewers killing people. The book is just set piece after set piece of people being graphically eaten by slugs, occasionally during or right after graphically having sex. The movie is slightly fewer and less graphic set pieces of people being eaten by slugs, with no graphic sex, and a dash of plot to have the whole thing have a reason for being.

Some things are obviously changed around, both for time reasons and just because screenwriters always seem to think they’re smarter than the authors they’re adapting and have to tweak the stories. The biggest one that stood out to me as both unnecessary and irritatingly stupid, is that in the book, Brady is a bit of a health nut. When he goes for a ride with the cop who starts smoking, he chastises the guy for smoking. When the cop finally tosses his butt, he picks up a piece of candy and Brady warns him it’s full of rat crap. Brady still warns about the candy in the movie, but it’s the cop who tells Brady to stop smoking in his car. Dammit, Ron Gantman (I guarantee you that’s a pseudonym, as he only wrote one other thing and it’s Spanish too), the point of the scene was that Brady is a HEALTH INSPECTOR who is worried about his HEALTH, so he wouldn’t be smoking. Warning the cop about the poop candy is just a snarky little joke in the book as a capper to the smoking bit, because the cop is a douche bag. When you put the cigarette in Brady’s hand, and he scolds the cop about the poop candy after being made to stop smoking in the car, it makes BRADY the douche bag. So congratulations, you just made your main character a petty, vindictive prick and we’re only ten minutes in. Dumbass. Go fight a bull or take a nap or sail around and get your ass kicked by the English, or whatever the fuck Spaniards do. Clearly understanding characterization is not your strong suit.

Several of the kills from the book are sort of cut and pasted together to fit the runtime with as many casualties as possible, like the obnoxious old lady and her potted plants put together with the lovable old gardener who has to chop his own hand off with his shears because the slugs are in his glove eating his hand, and somehow are keeping him from pulling the glove off and squishing them. And of course, the real famous scene of the bloodworms exploding out of the guy’s eye in the middle of a crowded restaurant is there in all its pus-spraying glory.

The biggest problem I had with the book, other than it reminding me of something I wrote when I was in 7th grade which was nothing but the monster from Watchers killing people in graphic ways with no plot getting in the way of the story (my favorite bit, and one I’d still like to use in a real story at some point, is where the thing rips a guy’s spine out and beats his friend to death with it), was that it started to sort of give a reason for the slugs killing people, and then never came back to it or explained what the hell was going on. The prologue tells of the slugs in an unspecified basement, with someone throwing pieces of meat to them. They fight over the meat, and start eating each other, and this process breeds a strain of carnivorous super-slug. But we never find out who was tossing the slugs prime pieces of meat, or why they had a basement full of slugs they were feeding the meat to. I mean, I’d even accept someone trying to breed an army of killer slugs to do their bidding. It’s stupid, but at least the explanation would have had a damn point. Besides, I just finished reading The Manitou, and nothing could possibly top the stupid of that ending. I do have to give the movie credit for fixing this problem and having the town the slugs attack built over an old toxic waste dump. When they start construction for a new shopping mall, a bulldozer smashes through some barrels of waste and viola, killer slug army.

When I saw this movie for the first time (I bought it at the same time as Island of Death, which is both a vastly superior movie), I remember being furious with the ending. It was so stupid it had me in a blind rage, or so my memory told me. Now that I’ve read the book, which is really stupid, but trashy enough to be fun, and watched the movie again, which is even more stupid and just barely trashy enough to be fun, I can’t understand why I hated the ending more than anything else. Brady and Palmer get some explosive pesticide made by Foley, their scientist friend (because everyone has one of those, and they all conveniently know exactly how to solve the problem at the last minute!), and blow up the slugs. The thing that I remember pissing me off is that, once the stuff is dumped into the sewer, it blows up several houses and every manhole in town is launched into the sky on a pillar of fire, yet every single emergency services vehicle in the county arrives at the exact manhole Brady comes out of (come on, Palmer is the fucking sidekick, did you really think he was coming through this unslugged?) even though they were keeping their plans a secret from the authorities.

Granted, that is deeply, brutally dumb, but no worse than any of the other stupid crap that happens in this movie. In the end, the book is a good one to pound in a couple of lazy afternoons, and the movie is fun with friends, but only those with an extremely high threshold for cinemasochism will get much enjoyment out of it alone.