Take Three: Michael Rooker

Craig here with this week's Take Three. Today: Michael Rooker

Take One: Slither (2007)
Rooker has a very bad time of it in Slither. For starters, he plays a brute and tyrant, and is almost pathologically cocksure of his local status as a small-town car dealer. He’s horrible and unfaithful to his wife and his name, Grant Grant, is doubly dumb. So when he’s “killed” by an alien parasite in a meteor which re-animates him as a mind-absorbed, ET-hosting slug-mutant, you don’t exactly sob over his lot in life. But things get worse: he has a future as the head of a fleshy multi-person blob – the kind of thing that Brian Yuzna or David Cronenberg might cook up after particularly eventful dreams – to look forward to. Before that, Rooker leaves a slime trail of extraterrestrial carnage. And it becomes clear at this point that it’s not “just a bee sting.”

For much of his screen time, all he does is slither (the title has it) about sporting gruesomely daft prosthetics that make him look like an exploded can of refried beans or a particularly nasty dental accident. Kudos to him for embracing his OTT part in so heartily; he goes with the giddy flow of all the comically gory sci-fi/horror trappings, playing up his macho onscreen persona to great effect. Grant gets a slippery comeuppance, but he gets some of the best lines too (“It’s just a bee sting!”) More actors ought to take Rooker’s lead and cake themselves in elaborate special effects to debase themselves in the name of cheerfully grisly supporting parts.

Cliff Hanging and Serial Killing after the jump

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