Wither Slither redux

Over at Cinematical, Scott Weinberg cops my title (or at least a variation of it) in the post “Wha’ts up with the Slither Wither?” — with the being so kind as to provide a citation and a link back.

Anyway, his goal is to explain why SLITHER bombed at the box office, and he approviingly cites Eli Roth’s quote in the Hollywood Reporter (which I mentioned in my previous post “Wither Slither”) to the effect that nobody will remember ICE AGE 2 in fifteen years but everyone will be watching SLITHER on DVD.

I won’t get into the specifics of Weinberg’s arguments, because he truly is making a mountain out of a molehill. The box office underperformance of SLITHER requires no big explanations, when the simplest one will suffice: the film is not very good, and it does not have a very broad appeal. It’s a cultish little movie that mistook itself for a mainstream box office hit. Sure, people will discover it on home video, in the same way they discovered its obvious progenitor, NIGHT OF THE CREEPS. It’s just amazint to me that anyone feels the need to “explain” why this film didn’t make $30-million during its opening weekend, instead of the $3.9-million it actually did.

A $30-million dollar opening — now that would have taken some explaining.