Videos
[Kill of the Week] Sliced Up the Middle in ‘Slither’
Every week, we spotlight a kill that we just can’t get enough of. This is Kill of the Week.
James Gunn, if you think about it, has had a career path very similar to both Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson. Like Raimi and Jackson, who started out making gory gross-out horror movies like Evil Dead and Dead Alive, Gunn began his career writing films for Troma, before making his directorial debut in 2006 with the creature feature Slither.
James Gunn has of course gone on to become a major player in Hollywood, writing and directing both Guardians of the Galaxy films for Marvel’s cinematic universe.
But before all that, it was Slither that really showed us what Gunn was made of as a filmmaker. The horror-comedy, a throwback to ’80s monster movies, starred Michael Rooker and Elizabeth Banks as husband and wife; Rooker’s Grant Grant gets infected by an alien parasite, turning him into a hideous monster, while Banks’s Starla fights for her life against alien slugs, mind-controlled zombies and, eventually, her own husband.
There are a handful of moments in Slither that certainly qualify for “kill of the week” shout-outs, including one particularly memorable scene wherein a woman’s body has been blown up to ridiculous proportions after being impregnated with massive amounts of the aforementioned slugs, eventually causing her body to completely explode.
In another moment, our chosen “kill of the week” for this week, the mutated Grant whips a gun-toting man with one of his tentacles, surgically splitting the man’s body straight up the middle and causing his guts to spill out all over the ground. Gunn’s choice to make this one a “time-release” kill, delaying the gory moment, makes it all the more fun.
Bloober Team has released a new developer diary for the upcoming Cronos: Lazarus DLC for Cronos: The New Dawn. Titled “Becoming the Warden,” the video features members of the dev team chatting it up about (obviously) The Warden, who unlike The Traveler in the main game, will focus more on faster, more aggressive action.
“We came back on the setting of Cronos because we wanted players to experience this super strong character,” says Game Design Director Marc Albinet. “The second reason was that we also wanted to provide a different flavor, a different taste of the original game.”
The DLC also puts greater emphasis on the more “emotional” human side of the story, where players learn of the cost of going up against The Collective. Cronos: Lazarus sees The Warden isolated in the Terminal and severed from the Collective, where he devotes every waking moment to awakening a lost Essence he refuses to let fade. However, his sanctuary, has been compromised. A new kind of hunter has been deployed with one directive: to find and eliminate him.
Scarred and broken by a lifetime of survival in the wasteland, The Warden is not at full strength, but even in his damaged state, he retains the ability to move fast, strike hard and survive against mounting pressure. In addition to being able to deploy a decoy to distract foes and being able to turn invisible to strike against distracted foes, The Warden can also teleport, which fits with the more aggressive playstyle of the DLC. He also has a souped-up version of the Dagger PS-3713 in the Gladius.
Cronos: Lazarus is slated to launch later this fall for PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store, the PlayStation 5, the Xbox Series, and the Nintendo Switch 2.