(One caveat; there's also a soundtrack album of the film available, containing rock selections from acts like The Yahoos, Jane Jensen, Corb Lund, Crystal Gayle and The Waco Brothers. "Baby I Love You" by The Yahoos is the first song on the soundtrack, but it's been edited to remove the F-bomb. The movie uses the unedited version, so ... WTF, guys?)

Director Gunn hyperbolically explains Tyler Bates' score as "Bernard Hermann put through a punk rock/John Zorn meat grinder, and then lovingly reassembled without any irony whatsoever." That characterization is a bit much, but the music is still pretty effective. Composer Bates has scored for Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead, Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects and Mario Van Peebles's excellent Baadasssss. Next up for him will be 2007's Resident Evil: Extinction.

Wise enough to know how to use silence as emphasis, Bates does solid and craftsmanlike if not terribly memorable work for Slither. Here he's working with an orchestra of 105 musicians, which allows him to really stretch out in places. Even so, he keeps the cues all fairly short. The longest one is 3:36, and only three others pass the 3-minute mark. (He does have fun with titling, though, from the Zappa-esque "What's That Smell?" to "Ho Lee Shit!", "Love Theme From Slither" and "Snaking the Mayor.")

Music for an alien "slug" fest

Bates knows how to push the appropriate buttons. He delivers the goods time after time, as with cue 3, "Just a Bee Sting," for example, accompanying the scene in which the alien slugs claim their first human victim. (How is it, by the way, that all the aliens landing on this world are so constructed as to find humans palatable? You'd think we'd be poisonous to some of 'em, at least.)

Cue 5, "I Can't Trust You!", is one of the best on the disc. It opens with nervous strings imitating wind, with percussion hits and brass stings providing emphasis. Castanets (!) and bongos add some nice color.

Cue six, "The Basement," is another winner. It opens with a quick build to a four-note piano figure, followed by the slightest hint of a wood flute, then drops down to near silence for a nail-biting minute, with only a few hints of piano and some "background" sounds to carry it along. Then abrupt percussion and an arpeggio "alarm" sound burst in to underline the intensity of the music—give a listen at 1:14. Bates follows all of this with some frantic string ostinatos a la Bernard Hermann's shower-scene music (hmm; could Gunn be right after all?) in Psycho. It's guaranteed to make the listener jump.

Disc packaging? Not much here, just some self-laudatory notes from Gunn, a track listing and a still or two from the film. Very nice front cover art and design, though, better than most.