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.

SLIME CITY MASSACRE (2010) Review

Directed by: Greg Lamberson
Written by: Greg Lamberson
Starring: Jennifer Bihl, Kealan Patrick Burke, Debbie Rochon, Lee Perkins, Robert C. Sabin, Mary Bogle

"WELCOME TO THE CITY WHERE SLIME NEVER SLEEPS"

With SLIME CITY MASSACRE writer / director Greg Lamberson has managed to create a sequel which is also a prequel to his original film which was released a whopping 22 years earlier. A new time period (two actually) and a (mostly) new cast mark the only major differences from the original film while the rest is a familiar mix of violent, slimy mayhem involving occult leader Zachary Devon's infamous concoctions.

In the wake of a dirty bomb attack, New York City has been evacuated and its only inhabitants now are homeless scavengers (or 'displaced refugees' as they are referred to in the film). A pair of fugitives Alexa (Bihl) and Cory (Burke) looking for shelter in the part of town now known as Slime City, stumble upon a seemingly abandoned building where they run into squatters Mason (Perkins) and Alice (Rochon) who decide to let them stay on account of Cory's impressive set of skeleton keys. While scavenging for food Mason and Cory come across a soup kitchen previously run by Zachary Devon, and inside they find hundreds of bottles of the satanist's home brewed elixir and 'Himalayan Yoghurt'.
Back at their building the two couples chow down on the yoghurt and elixir, go to bed, fuck and unsurprisingly wake up covered with slime and filled with bloodlust.

A decent part of the film is also told through black and white flashbacks, showing scenes that pre-date the original movie and fill in a little of the back story of Zachary Devon and his followers. We witness his first meeting with Nicole as he 'saves' her from her life of prostitution and invites him into his soup kitchen for a meal and a place to belong. It also explains further the moment when Zachary and his followers decide to kill themselves and why Lizzie had to stay behind.
But wait, there's more! A wealthy entrepreneur named Ronald Crump (get it?) has plans to level Slime City so that he can redevelop it, but first he needs to rid it of its transient infestation. His solution? Hire a group of mercenaries to go in and shoot anything that moves. It's all very ESCAPE FROM THE BRONX, and there's nothing wrong with that because that movie rocks.

The political and religious commentaries are obvious in SLIME CITY MASSACRE. A war over oil? Check. Abortions declared illegal? Check. Rich businessman wants to cleanse the city of the bottom-dwelling lower class? Check. Incestuous religious cult? Double check. There's also a really neat STREET TRASH reference, no doubt thrown in due to all of the comparisons people have made in the past.
Almost everything in this sequel outdoes the original, the acting is better, the production values are better, the locations are better, and even the no-boobs issue from the first movie is rectified here. Fans of the original will enjoy the cameos from the original actors and Troma fans will love the trashy vibe and the brief appearance of uncle Lloyd. The only real shame is that the ending doesn't pack anywhere near as powerful a punch as that of the original movie did. But it's still fucking fun.

SLIME CITY (1988) Review

Directed by: Greg Lamberson
Written by: Greg Lamberson
Starring: Robert C. Sabin, Mary Huner, T. J. Merrick, Dick Biel, Dennis Embry

"A HORROR FILM WITH GUTS!"

SLIME CITY is a low budget trash classic that sits comfortably on the shelf beside the likes of BASKET CASE, BODY MELT and STREET TRASH. It's cheap, nasty and gory and not everybody's cup of tea but if you're a fan of Troma classics like THE TOXIC AVENGER and CLASS OF NUKE 'EM HIGH then you'll definitely find something to like here. If slime, blood and a touch of the occult are what you're looking for then you've come to the right place.

Alex (Sabin) is a quiet, sexually frustrated artist who decides to rent an apartment with the aim of getting his girlfriend Lori (Huner) to sleep over. The landlady is happy to rent him the apartment, a little too happy in fact but Alex doesn't seem to care much as long as he has his own place so he can hopefully finally get some pussy. The other tenants in the building are a collection of weirdos and it's when one of these strange neighbours invites him over for dinner that things start to get really crazy. His neighbour Roman (Embry) feeds him some green 'Himalayan yoghurt' and a strange home brewed 'elixir'. Feeling a little worse for wear Alex stumbles back to his apartment, meets the seductive Nicole (also played by Mary Huner) and they end up doing the horizontal mambo. When Alex wakes up the next morning his body is covered with a thick slime so he goes out and beats a homeless man to death, as you do. After feeding this inexplicable bloodlust Alex goes back to his regular non-slimy self.

We learn not too long after that the 'elixir' Alex has been drinking is actually ectoplasm, brewed by a Satanist  named Zachary who (along with his followers) killed himself in the building's basement. The ectoplasm is a primer to facilitate the return of Zachary using Alex's body as a vessel. Will Alex be able to stop his body being taken over by an evil dead Satanist? Will he ever get his girlfriend in the sack? Well to be honest it's pretty easy to predict how the film is going to end, but it's a hell of a fun ride along the way. There's prostitute slicing, bum bashing, some weird erotic dancing, head smashing and much more to see. Sure the effects look cheap (the guts near the end look like hotdogs and scrambled eggs) but they look great in that really trashy kind of way, and the facial makeup on Alex when he turns is actually pretty decent.

SLIME CITY doesn't really start out very strong , in fact to be honest it's a bit slow and there's probably too many talky scenes, but peppered throughout the film are some great gore scenes. One of the more memorable ones sees a mugger stab Alex in the stomach before the wound becomes a mouth that bites his hand off, leaving him with a blood-spraying stump. And even better is the finale which is by far the coolest and goriest part of the movie. The entire film is pretty much made worthwhile by this final scene.
As you might expect the acting isn't anything to rave over, the dialogue is nothing special and even the editing and photography are pretty mediocre. It's a shame there isn't any nudity (especially in a movie with such an obvious sexual theme) but there is a kind of sexy, kind of weird lingerie dance.
SLIME CITY's meagre budget is obvious but so is it's ambition and it's easy to see that the cast and crew had some fun making it. It's easy to write off as just another low budget piece of shit but for fans of cult and trash cinema this is a must see.

MOLD! (2012) Review

Directed by: Neil Meschino
Written by: Dave Fogerson, Meil Meschino
Starring: Lawrence George, Ardis Campbell, Chris Gentile, Rick Haymes, Mike Keller, Edward X. Young

"THIS ISN'T SCIENCE... IT'S MURDER!"

Earlier this week I reviewed a movie about killer worms, creatures which are right up there in the category of 'least threatening things to make a horror movie about ever'. Surprisingly I found it to be quite an effective and well made film and probably more terrifying than it should have been. But what about mold? Could the same green fuzzy stuff that grows on your old food be successfully utilized in a horror movie? Neil Meschino's appropriately titled MOLD! is here to answer that question.

It's 1984 and the US is at the height of the Reagan era war on drugs. Somewhere inside a secret research installation a group of scientists have been working hand in hand with the military to produce a new strain of super-mold, designed to wipe out Columbia's vast coca fields. The political and military big wigs have come by to witness a demonstration of the new biological weapon but of course something goes horribly wrong and the deadly mold is unleashed. Trapped inside the facility with the mold spreading, scientists Roger (Georgie), Julia (Campbell), Dave (Gentile) and Matthew (Haymes) along with an army Colonel (Young) and Sergeant (Keller) need to figure out how to prevent themselves from becoming the deadly growth's next victims.

MOLD! is a very low budget film and as such it takes place in a limited number of small rooms, in fact the majority of the film takes place in one such room. As you might expect it's quite heavy on the talking in-between characters but luckily there is some entertaining dialogue to keep things interesting. The Colonel is by far the most stand out character and despite the overacting he delivers some of the best lines in the film. My personal favorite occurs when his cigar smoking habit is questioned. His reply? "If I could survive a knife fight with a Cambodian mountain jaguar then this little cigar ain't got a chance!" Pure gold. He also makes a number of references to other films which range from cheesy to cringeworthy.

The effects are all practical which is great but I was a little disappointed with the low level of slime in the first hour or so of the movie. I was (perhaps unfairly) expecting some STREET TRASH lever slime and splatter but there's mostly mold-caked walls and a bit of green slime. But where the film really hits its stride is in the final half hour which is full of exploding faces and buckets of blood and goo all over.
MOLD! may not have a ground breaking new concept, it may not have top-tier acting or an excellent script but what it does have in spades is entertainment value, which in all honesty is even more important. If you're looking for a fun, low budget flick then give MOLD! a chance, it may just grow on you.