THE INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN (1977) Review

Directed by: William Sachs
Written by: William Sachs
Starring: Alex Rebar, Burr DeBenning, Myron Healey, Ann Sweeny, Michael Alldredge

"THE FIRST NEW HORROR CREATURE!"

"You've never seen anything, 'til you've seen the Sun through the rings of Saturn!" - so says Astronaut Steve West (Rebar) right before being bombarded with radiation and crossing the gross, dripping threshold between being a human and being THE INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN! Critics seem to love shitting all over this movie (it's sitting at 8% on Rotten Tomatoes right now while its audience score is a much more appropriate 68%)
but you can't fault it for delivering exactly what it promises; a melting man. The 'plot' basically consists of a liquefying man in a blind rage, murdering people indiscriminately while wearing buckets of Rick Baker's excellent practical effects.

Essentially FIRST MAN INTO SPACE or THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT brought forward a couple of decades, THE INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN takes a common '50s premise and updates it with some classic '70s effects. Astronaut Steve West is orbiting Saturn when some super space radiation comes out of nowhere and gives him a gnarly nosebleed. Back on Earth Steve is lying in a hospital bed, covered with bandages, and this is when he begins his slimy transformation into the titular melting man. He terrorizes a fat nurse, escaping the hospital in the process and then goes on an all out killing spree, becoming stronger and more violent as he melts. It's up to Dr Ted Nelson (DeBenning) and General Michael Perry (Healey) to stop him, but only if Dr Nelson can find some goddamn crackers to go with his goddamn soup!

 Apart from a radical drippy mutoid murdering people we're also treated to an array of some of the most interesting scenes I've seen lately. One of the best is when Dr Nelson tries to pull one of those "hey, look over there!" distractions on his wife, making a HUGE deal about not having crackers to go with his soup just because he wants to avoid talking about the melting man that's on the loose. Brilliant. Then there's the nurse who jumps through a window (in slow-motion) for no reason at all. And then of course there's 'The Adventures of Severed Head' in which we watch (for no reason) as a disembodied noggin floats down a river and then down a waterfall before smashing on sharp rocks at the bottom. How integral are these scenes to the movie? Not at all, but they're brilliant.

THE INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN is most definitely not everybody's cup of tea. The melting man cares not for plot! The melting man cares not for character development! The melting man cares not for explaining things! In fact the melting man only really cares for murder, and the movie only really cares about the melting man. And there's nothing wrong with that. If gore, slime, boobs and slime is the kind of thing you look for in a movie then you're in luck because that's about all you'll get in this brilliantly '70s schlockfest.