Most free movie-inspired online games are trite gimmicks, and Slither: Hunting Season — based on James Gunn’s 2006 campy horror film Sliver — is certainly one of them. But Hunting Season is astonishingly well-made for a simple 3rd person shooter that has you do little more than point and click to shoot at random on-coming targets while offbeat sound bytes from the film randomly play over the speakers. The game puts you, a desperate cop with a rifle, slightly off the center of the screen, generating a sense of helplessness as the camera peers straight down from above in an bird’s eye view. The player’s job is to keep on the lookout for approaching monster worms, targeting the cop’s rifle at them as quickly as possible. As if pinned to the hub of a wheel, you don’t get to move. Instead, things come crawling at you — and the better you are at picking them off, the harder and harder it gets to shoot them all. The game play is excellent, because it truly succeeds in making you feel “surrounded” by the enemy… which wants to jump in your mouth, wriggle down your throat and infest you with its slimy body. You’ll get a gratuitous gore clip when you get killed in the game, which makes the impossible survival of the onslaught sort of worth it. (”What kind of animal WANTS you to eat it?” one sound byte from Slither asks. The answer? Hollywood.)

Bring on the worms: http://www.slithermovie.net/hunting/

Hunting Season requires the latest Shockwave Player (installed automatically as a browser plug in). It may also require a fast internet connection and a decent graphics card in your computer, because the design is richly competitive with most modern shooting games for the PC.