I am old enough to remember going to the movie theater to watch this flick. It was on a Saturday afternoon, and my folks gave me a dollar to watch it. I was ten years old. Back in those days we watched movies for fun, or barring that, to stay out of our parent’s hair and let them have some time alone.
Here’s some fun “elevator pitches” for science fiction movies. How about having astronauts land on an asteroid that’s on a collision course with earth? Wait, it gets better— to save the world they have to use drilling equipment to bore holes in the rocky surface to plant nuclear bombs inside and blow the renegade asteroid into space dust. Not working for you? Okay, try this one on. How about having an alien life form that looks harmless in its infant state brought aboard a space ship. Then it breaks loose, transforming into a monstrous killing machine that slaughters the crew one by one! - Horror News
Lately, most of the larger (high budget) movies out of Hollywood are nothing more that venues to ram-rod social justice “improvements” down our collective throats. This policy certainly started long ago. Maybe back during the Clinton administration, but it most certainly became heated up to a degree of red-hot insanity during the Obama presidency.
Now we have a 007 “James Bond” flick that going to have a new transgender LGBT “woman of color” in the role of secret agent. Funny how she looks like a morph of Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama. Yuck!
Anyways, let’s get back to the movie at hand; Green slime.
This is a movie perfect for the eleven year old boy inside of all of us. It’s got a cool retro 1960’s sound track. (It’s got) Cool miniatures with all sorts of detail like something out of Fireball XL-5. It’s got spacemen exploring a rogue asteroid and carrying space rifles (!). It’s got a love triangle with a handsome man with a chiseled face, and the girls all look like they came out of a 1960’s playboy magazine.
And it’s got monsters.
Lots and lots of monsters.
Right out of the gate you can feel the movie itching to get to the good stuff– that song barely lasts a verse and a chorus before Robert Horton, as Commander Jack Rankin, arrives at space station Gamma 3 ready to head up a very dangerous mission– landing on a strange asteroid and exploding it out of its collision course with Earth. -Trailers from Hell
What’s not to love?
I saw THE GREEN SLIME in 1968 at the Omni Center Theatre in Atlanta Georgia with my brother and cousin and was awestruck and terrified as only a 6-year-old boy seeing a movie called THE GREEN SLIME in 1968 could be so I’ve always had a huge soft spot in my heart for this film (I was lucky enough to attend a 16mm screening at Cinema Wasteland a couple of years ago and it held up great). I mentioned three things that I think make THE GREEN SLIME so enduring. One. The title, THE GREEN SLIME is so perfect and unpretentious that Saturday matinee audiences in 1968 had to know exactly what was in store and I can’t imagine anyone feeling let down. Second, THE GREEN SLIME has one of the funkiest title songs in cinema history. Written by Charles Fox (who would go on to write the themes for THE LOVE BOAT and HAPPY DAYS) and accompanied by a frenzied drum beat and blaring electric guitars (someone edited the song to clips of battle scenes from the film and posted it on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKESo2ofEcw). THE GREEN SLIME theme is a blast and was even released as a single! Third, the poster is my absolute favorite from the 1960’s. The bold colorful artwork features the emerald cretins in an action-packed outer space battle with flying spacemen while holding a terrified Luciana Paluzzi in a skin-tight metallic spacesuit in the foreground (an outfit like nothing she wears in the film). The poster is a throwback to the “bug-eyed monster” posters of the 1950’s and the artwork even graced the cover of “Famous Monsters of Filmland” #57 in 1969. I have an original THE GREEN SLIME three-sheet (40 x 80 inches) and it’s proudly displayed in my den along with my Resin Green Slime model kit and vintage “The Green Slime are Coming!” button. - My Favorite Movies: The One About the Green Slime That I Saw at the Theater When I Was Six
The Characters
The plot of THE GREEN SLIME play like a precursor (or parody) to ARMEGEDDEON and then ALIEN as a runaway asteroid, known as Flora (!), is determined to be on a collision course with earth. Rugged astronaut Jack Rankin (Robert Horton) is ordered out of retirement to command Space Station Gamma 3, an enormous ring-shaped outpost populated by a detachment of scientists and military personnel, and stop Flora before it destroys our planet. Onboard Rankin meets his old flame Lisa (Luciana Paluzzi) and her fiancée, Commander Vince Elliot (Richard Jaeckel), Rankin's former close friend. Rankin, Elliot and the sinister Doctor Halvorsen (Ted Gunther) land a shuttle on the asteroid, depositing explosives in an attempt to nuke Flora. They succeed, but a small wad of pulsating green jelly adheres itself to Dr. Halvoson’s spacesuit and is brought back to the station unobserved. The crew celebrates with a groovy party featuring nurses in short skirts and high heels shimmying to 60’s electronic tunes, unaware that the oozy green stowaway is morphing into a deadly tentacled creature out to electrocute everyone in its path. Attempts to kill the slimy beast backfire as each drop of its blood grows into a new monster until Gamma 3 is infested with these waddling critters collectively known as… ...The Green Slime!! - My Favorite Movies: The One About the Green Slime That I Saw at the Theater When I Was Six
- Commander Jack Rankin – This guy wouldn’t stop smiling if a rabid weasel was in his shorts; he would just grin and give you a thumbs up.
- Commander Vince Elliott – In charge of the space station and not very happy Rankin is senior to him. A rash man who gives one Green Slime a hug. (That means he dies.)
- Lisa Benson – Woman torn between loving Rankin and Elliott.
- Dr. Halvorsen – Head researcher aboard the space station, he gets seriously fried.
- General Jonathan Thompson – Gruff senior officer, his main role in this movie is sweating.
- Captain Martin – Elliott’s right hand man, for some reason he looks natural in a white motorcycle helmet.
- The Green Slime – Alien life form which feeds on energy and even a single drop of blood can regenerate into new creatures. Incinerated.
The Green Slime has the secret weapon every B-Movie needs- Richard Jaeckel. Jaeckel was a prolific, academy award nominated actor who bounced between supporting roles in big budget films and starring turns in B-pictures. In fact he was nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar for Sometimes A Great Notion (1970) right after he starred in The Green Slime. What made Jaeckel so special was that (like Shelly Winters) he always delivered a class-A performance in any film, regardless of its quality. If you watch The Green Slime carefully you’ll notice that he’s always moving, or emoting— giving the audience a little something extra. He never steals scenes from his co-stars, but he’s always the most interesting thing onscreen. - Horror News
THE GREEN SLIME was an American/Japanese co-production shot in Tokyo with a mostly American cast (extras are Japanese or played by American servicemen stationed in Japan) and a Japanese director giving the film a stilted, off-the-wall international quality. It was shot in English but crudely post-dubbed and the whole cast has English monikers regardless of their ethnicity (exotic Italian beauty Luciana Paluzzi plays…..Lisa Benson!). Square-jawed Robert Horton (a TV actor best known for starring in WAGON TRAIN) delivers a comically wooden lead performance as the arrogant and condescending Rankin. As Elliott, Richard Jaeckel seems to have more fun with his role and he makes a good space hero (Jaeckel stayed in Japan to costar in the equally absurd LATITUDE ZERO before returning to Hollywood and Oscar-nominated the next year for SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION). Luciana Paluzzi had made a splash as Bond girl Fiona Volpe in THUNDERBALL in 1965 and makes for equally sexy here. Director Kinji Fukasaku went on to make cult items MESSAGE FROM SPACE in 1978 (a gonzo STAR WARS knockoff starring Sonny Chiba that featuresmassive sailboats in space!) and the controversial “teens- killing-teens” epic BATTLE ROYALE in 2000. THE GREEN SLIME’s toy-like special effects are hardly realistic, but there are a ton of them and most are ambitious and imaginatively designed. The spaceships look like models because they are models and the fact that they are way overlit doesn’t help. It’s the monsters themselves that make THE GREEN SLIME so memorable. Squat and lumpy, with one giant red eye surrounded by many smaller eyes, the rubbery, tentacle-waving gremlins were played by Japanese children in clumsy suits. They seem more than a bit silly today but, with their high-pitched electronic squeal, were pretty nightmarish to young audiences in 1968. - My Favorite Movies: The One About the Green Slime That I Saw at the Theater When I Was Six
The Plot
Packing more goofy models and props than most Godzilla films comes this lovely piece of b-cinema.
I still want to know who starched Commander Rankin’s face while he was smiling, either the guy is a loon or he’s on some serious happy pills. Prozac boy gets things done though; when you have a rogue asteroid hurtling toward Earth he’s the man to call. (Not Bruce Willis, mind you.)
... a brilliantly artificial and eerily vibrant landscape which writer Richard Harland Smith accurately described as perfectly evocative of the Major Matt Mason space station and lunar base command toy sets of the 1960s, reproduced with full-scale reverence and a dash of pop sci-fi psychedelia. -Trailers from Hell
When the astronauts land to place their bombs they find the asteroid is inhabited by strange blobs of glowing slime that are drawn to the equipment. After blasting off and barely escaping the massive explosion (Imagine an orange and brown papier mache’ ball with half a stick of dynamite inside and you’re golden.) the heroes return to Space Station Gamma 3.
Just because The Green Slime predates Alien and Armageddon doesn’t mean it’s some visionary piece of science fiction cinema. On the surface it’s a subpar space opera with rubber-suited monsters, cheesy miniatures and a cast of B-movie veterans struggling to kill aliens while keeping a straight face. But despite its myriad of deficiencies The Green Slime is a charming time capsule of mid sixties camp. Watching its colorful “mod” sets, plastic helmeted astronauts and man-in-a-suit monsters is like sprawling in a bean bag chair, sipping a can of Schlitz while feeling the luxurious shag carpeting beneath your toes. Scientists aboard the Gamma-3 space station discover a massive asteroid careening towards earth. UN Space Command dispatches their bravest and squarest jawed astronaut (Robert Horton) to command the mission to destroy the deadly celestial body, which looks like a cat toy you’d find moldering under the couch. But our hero has a long simmering feud with the space station’s commander (Richard Jaeckel) who stole his fiancée (Luciana Paluzzi) who happens to be the space station’s resident doctor. Putting their differences aside they land on the asteroid, drill holes, plant nukes and zip back to the space station, barely escaping the atomic blast. The earth is saved, but during their escape a small bit of green slimy alien life adheres itself to an astronaut’s space suit and hitches a ride to Gamma-3. Due to the station’s high oxygen (or testosterone) levels the little blob of space spooge sprouts into a menagerie of man sized monsters shooting electricity from their tentacles. Will the astronauts defeat the alien invaders? Will the big haired sexy doctor dump her beau for her brick headed ex fiancé? Will our two heroes finally give in to their seething homoerotic tension and be as god made them? Its all part of The Green Slime experience. - Horror News
Unfortunately, for everyone, some of the slime was carried back on a space suit. It soon evolves into a tentacled creature! So the thing kinda looks like Sigmund the Sea Monster – he never fried anyone with several thousand volts of electricity. (Yes, I know it’s the amps that get you.) This gives a nice excuse for Elliott and Rankin to have a power struggle over who is in charge, the latter a firm believer in “shoot first ask questions later.”
Another unfortunate fact about Green Slime: even a single drop of blood will grow into a new monster. So now you have dozens of pissed off Sigmunds running around electrocuting the crew, good job Rankin.
In the end humanity is saved by crashing Gamma 3 into Earth’s atmosphere, incinerating the Green Slime. Thank goodness something stopped them besides THROWING your laser rifle. The characters often unload at point blank range without effect. Soon as they throw the weapon it goes right through the monster’s eye. Even if you don’t like watching “spacemen” wearing white 1960’s police motorcycle helmets firing “laser guns” at waddling masses of latex monsters you have to love the title song.
Things I Learned From This Movie:
- Asteroids look like a Gobstopper which has been under the refrigerator for ten years.
- Movies are less interesting from a phone’s objective.
- Pulsing green muck plays heck with interstellar golf carts.
- People can stand up and walk around while experiencing ten G’s.
- Never let a bitter exgirlfriend tend your wound.
- Alien life is best represented by green soap suds.
- Space station security guards wear white motorcycle helmets with a little space symbol on them.
- Golf carts are not four wheel drive.
- Laser rifles work better as spears.
- Never hug an ungrounded Green Slime.
The most charming thing about The Green Slime is how the filmmakers lovingly revel in its cheesiest elements. Those miniature rocket ships don’t zip by in an instant— instead the producers proudly linger on them as if they were unveiling 2001 A Space Odyssey (1968). The unconvincing rubber monsters aren’t confined to fleeting, shadowy glimpses— Nope, they’re given long loving close-ups under brighter lights than a baseball game. I love the filmmakers for having the balls to do that. Plus Alien never had a rocking psychedelic theme song. Why Richard Delvy’s title tune, actually entitled The Green Slime, never made it onto Lenny Kaye’s classic psychedelic music anthology Nuggets is beyond me. The Green Slime’s other achievement is compressing entire plot of Armageddon into the first fifteen minutes. Why couldn’t Michael Bay have done that? - Horror News
Stuff To Watch For:
- 2 mins – Nice miniatures, ahm.
- 13 mins – For some reason this scene is making me horny.
- 25 mins – Bad dubbing!
- 48 mins – White motorcycle helmets?
- 64 mins – RANDOM ACT OF VIOLENCE AGAINST A FLASHLIGHT!
- 70 mins – The explosion took out half of the model space station, but not that flimsy door?
- 75 mins – Elliott could use some boxing lessons.
- 83 mins – Jack, I’m going to kick your smiling self in the testicles. What do you think of that?
The Green Slime was a coproduction between America’s MGM Studios and Japan’s Toei Company LTD. But oddly for a Japanese based production, the entire cast, right down to the extras, is entirely western. This presented Toei with a genuine casting challenge. As a result the crew of Gamma-3 are a mix of struggling American fashion models plucked from Tokyo’s fashion runways and American sailors on shore leave from the nearby Yokosuka Naval base. That’s right, those glamorous young models were thrown together with guys who’d been stuck on an Aircraft Carrier deployed off Vietnam for six months! Take a good look boys… cause this is what you’re fighting for! Hidden among the space stations impossibly pretty female crew is blonde haired Linda Miller who, a year earlier, had been the lead in the Japanese American co-production King Kong Escapes. If you ever wake up with a hangover skip the Advil and coffee and try a double bill of The Green Slime and King Kong Escapes— your pain will be forgotten. - Horror News
Conclusion
In 1968 my eight-year-old pals and I absorbed the adventure of The Green Slime and took that template to the playground, turning every jungle gym or set of monkey bars into the Gamma 3. Looking at The Green Slime today I confess I am not seized with the urge to run over to the nearby elementary school and start back up where I left off 46 years ago. After all, there are plenty of reasons to put away childish things, to bid a safe farewell to childhood and our nostalgia for it. (My bathroom scale insists this is so.) But for me The Green Slime beautifully recreates a playground of the mind to match the one I had to leave behind. -Trailers from Hell
This movie will never get an Oscar award. But it’s a great movie for a rainy day, and fantastic to spend with a case of beer, some friends, a pet and loyal dog (or cat), a loved one and some potato chips. Not the flavored kind, mind you, good “old fashioned” American style salted chips… with dip. Lots and lots of dip.
In closing, if you wake up craving a piece of nostalgic science fiction fromage The Green Slime is exactly what you’re looking for. And don’t forget to sing along to the psychedelic theme song (later covered by the Fuzztones) for a totally immersive experience. Everybody sing… You’ll believe it when you find… Something sreamin’ ‘cross your mind… GREEN SLIME… GREEN SLIME! - Horror News
I do hope that you enjoyed this post. I have other movie review in my Movie Index. Please feel free to check them out…
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