The other night, moriarty6 and I wandered down to the DVD store with the specific intent of finding a horror movie (or two) so hideously trashy that it could only be washed down with cheap red wine and some horse tranquilizers. To that end, we failed rather gloriously -- and instead, we came home with Slither and Perfect Creature.

Slither: Body-snatching slug-monsters with a hive mentality take over a small South Carolina burgh that is fortunate enough to have Nathan Fillion for a police chief. That which follows is mostly downright hilarious. I love, love, love that the alien slug-zombie menace descends upon a heavily armed southern town at the start of deer season. I furthermore loved Chief Bill and his mastery of the well-spoken obvious*, and I did not mind the cognitive disconnects and the occasional obligatory bit of oddball logic. What a preposterously fun movie. I wish to God I'd caught it in the theater.

Perfect Creature: Three words, baby -- steampunk. vampire. priests. Need I say more? No? That's all right, I will anyway. Even in the midst of the requisite info-dumps, this New Zealand import hits all the right notes and never misses a beat when it comes to setting the perfect tone. Perfect Creature is set in an alternate reality present with technology that languishes somewhere between the 1890s and the 1930s. It's a softly lit, dirty place -- plagued with devastating influenza outbreaks and semi-effectively protected by a (pseudo-ruling) priest class of church elders who are all benevolent vampires. But when one influenza-infected vampire goes bananas and starts killing people in gruesome ways, havoc ensues. This one stars Dougray Scott, who made me damn near crazy trying to figure out where I'd seen him before -- until I went to IMDB and realized that he was the smokin' hot prince in the cute-but-dumb Drew Barrymore Cinderella flick Ever After.

Anyway ... great clothes, great set, great action. Great steam, too, even when you're not sure where it's coming from or what it's doing there. No, seriously. There were many points in this movie where we found ourselves wondering why a particular set of pipes -- which did not appear to be connected to anything -- nonetheless billowed steam.** And when all the steam finally settled and the credits rolled, we were left feeling like we'd watched a TV pilot that ended right when it was getting really interesting; but regardless, this one's very much worth watching.

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* Sample dialogue: "That is some fucked-up shit right there." But yanno. Delivered by Nathan Fillion, and therefore almost inadvertently hysterical.
** Which led to a great deal of drunkenly circular discussion about whether or not this was steampunk because it was full of steam, or whether it was full of steam because it was steampunk. Either way, I bet the actors came out of this one with dewy fresh skin.