Hello, and welcome to Weird House Cinema. Rewind. My name is Joe McCormick. Today we are bringing you an older episode of Weird House Cinema. This one originally published on August eighteenth, twenty twenty three, and it was Oh it was on The Green Slime. Oh boy, what a fun theme song. This one had a film from nineteen sixty eight, a Japanese American co production science fiction. Rubber Monster is a tentacle, arms waving. It's going to be a blast.
Welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hey you, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.
And this is Joe McCormick. And today we're going to be talking about the nineteen sixty eight Would people call this a Tokusatsu.
Movie, Yes, but with some caveats that we'll get into.
Okay, Well, whatever it is, it's a sci fi monster adventure of the Tokusatsu flavor or not, whether depending on your taste, it is the nineteen sixty eight film The Green Slime. This is one of those movies that I
had seen before, but not really I'd like. I used to put this on sometimes with no sound on, so I be hanging out with people and just look up and see the monsters of this film wiggling their wonderful arms in space, with sparks shooting out in darkened hallways, and see kind of you know, square jawed spacemen running around looking grim at each other while the the monsters close in. And it was a great vibe. But I'd never actually heard anything heard any of the dialogue before,
so I didn't really know what the story was. And now here we are, I'm coming home to the green slime.
Yeah, the viewing experience that we put ourselves through for weird how cinema is often rather different from what we've gone through in the past. And I've there have been times where we've covered a film that I've seen before and my wife will ask me, do you really need to watch it again because you've seen it multiple times,
and I'm like, yes, I have to. For this to be academically pure and nay, spiritually pure, I need to approach it with, you know, a fresh mindset and give everything the benefit of a doubt and you know, have my complete attention on it.
Well, I never knew before how much of this movie was a space marine Love Triangle.
Yes, it is. This is a It is a space marine love Triangle. If you like love triangles and you like lots of like militaristic running around, well then this is the movie for you. It's also kind of fitting that this week is green slime when last week was an orange slime movie. So we've gone from orange to green. We're probably not going to keep up the chromatic responsibility here, though.
That's right. I would say the slime has a different consistency. You know, the slime that you're referring to from last week, I assume you mean what was inside the black obelisk from the viewing, that was a very waxy slime. The green slime, I would say, is a much more gelatinous type of substance.
Yeah, now you may if you've seen the trailer for this before, certainly have you've seen it before, you know that it has a very groovy theme song. It's prominently featured in the trailer that we're going to listen to in just a little bit. But don't let that groovy theme song fool you, because they're parts of this movie
that I think hit pretty hard. And it's also you know, really it's a really fun film, but it's more procedural and significantly less groovy, at least compared to that just awesome US poster art and that US theme song.
I can't believe you're talking trash on the theme song. The theme song is great. It's like a late sixties garage jam. We were trying to think what to compare it to before we started.
It's a little bit.
Kind of vanilla fudgie almost.
I think the thing about the theme song is that, for the longest and I'd never seen this movie until I watched it for today's episode, it always gave me the vibe that this was a bikini movie, you know what I'm saying, Even though I'd never seen any stills of bikinis. It made me think that it was going to be kind of like that silly, groovy movie for the kids, Daddy O, kind of a flavor that you see in various films from this time period. But it's
actually not the case. As we'll discuss, the grooviness was kind of added in post for the American audience.
Yes, that's exactly right. Well, the theme song suggests that this is a switched on, far out ride the human element is surprisingly square like it's about these people who are part of Space Command, and the human themes are apart from a love triangle. It's very much about like what it means to follow orders and do your duty exactly.
Yeah, now, real quick. If you have seen that movie poster, you know what I'm talking about it. If not, go look it up. It's beautiful to behold. I believe this was a painting done by vic Avadi, who did a lot of great paper back novels. I found a blog post featuring some of his work from back in the day, and there's some very stunning stuff. I'm not one hundred percent certain, but I think he also did the classic
poster art for nineteen sixty nine's The Italian Job. This is the one where the poster art shows Michael Kane's character and then there's a woman with like a map drawn on her back.
Mm.
Yeah, okay, And we can say I think that this poster continues the fifties and sixties sci fi horror trend of I don't know, there's a motif of questionable sexual politics, where there's almost always a woman shown either unconscious or horizontal in some way, usually being carried by a monster, or sort of horizontal and screaming while the monster looms
over her. This is a variation on that where she's not exactly horizontal, she's diagonal and the green Slime monster is appearing from behind her with one of its tentacles wrapped suggestively around her thigh.
Yes, and the green Slime Monster looks great tentacle swhirling. It's like stone dope eyeball, like burning bloodshot against the against deep space, great poster.
You know, it's hard to read emotions onto the faces of the green Slime monsters because they are each a cyclops. They only have one eye. But if you were to try to imagine two eyes like this next to each other and say what facial expression of emotion it would indicate, I would say, actually, this eye is almost kind of a weary eye. It's kind of like, oh.
This world. That's a good point. Good point, you see what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah, it looks.
Like you've seen it all. He's tired of it. It's like another space station to conquer.
And the way that it says that out loud is by going like that, you'll hear the sound effect in the trailer. But they have this very distinct really I think fitting sound that they make. It's just completely alien.
It's somewhere between quacking and squealing.
Yeah, maybe a little bit of dolphin thrown in there.
Yeah.
So this, like I said, this is a fun movie.
I enjoyed it. I think one of the problems though, that it encountered is that it had the misfortune to come out late in nineteen sixty eight, several months after Stanley Kubrick's two thousand and one A Space Odyssey, a film that is ultimately setting out to achieve drastically different things, but a film that still involves shots of space stations and rockets, shots of people in spacesuits, visiting planets, and ultimately some sort of encounter with an alien intelligence of
one sort or another.
I feel like this is an almost perfect example of something that sometimes happens in film criticism and you know, I guess in broader audience appreciation, which has really forced comparisons between films that there's no reason to compare them except maybe that one is on your mind when you happened to see the other.
So like.
Calling this movie, you know, like not as good as two thousand and one A Space Odyssey, or like, I think you're about to read a quote that makes a comparison saying it's like a poor Man's two thousand and one. That is such a forced and absurd comparison to make. It's like saying that this beagle is not as good as this alligator. It's just like, I don't even understand what kind of scale you're using to compare these completely different objects.
Yeah, yeah, exactly, because at the time there were a lot of comparisons made to a Space Odyssey, a two thousand and one of Space Odyssey, and the reviewers were rough on it. I'm gonna read, Yeah, this part of this review from Variety magazine. This one is attributed to brad Oh.
They just had first names back.
Then, apparently, And I'm not super well versed with Variety, but I was looking. I looked at a few different reviews from back in the day, and yeah, they're attributed to a first name. I don't know. The last name is given elsewhere publication. And also this is very much like an industry or certainly at the time, was an industry focused publication. So you'll hear some some little tidbits and some lingo here and there, that's clearly you know ultimately about the bottom line in Hollywood.
Okay, but what does Brad say about the green slime?
Quote? Science fiction devotees who can take the subject tongue in cheek may find a few humorous moments in this pick, which at times resembles a poor man's version of two thousand and one. The special effects are amateurish, the story and script in the same category. Box office potential is limited, with exploitation possibilities focusing on what title refers to as quote unquote the green slime, a substance which adheres to
uniforms of men back from space exploration. The cells of the slime multiply at an incomprehensible rate, allowing the development of a serpent like monster.
Did Brad watch the movie? Is this a serpent like monster?
Brad might have been working on the copy a little bit during some of the action sequences, it is my bet. Now Brad goes on to outline the plot further and describe the performances as routine. So but this again, I'm not super famiar with Variety magazine, especially of that day. So this led me down a brief rabbit hole. I was like, okay, well, what did they say about two thousand and one? And what did they say about another movie?
I can help but compare it to Planet of the Vampires, which came out earlier, which is another space film with space ships encountering strange life forms, but one that's very stylish. We of course, talked about Mario Baba's Planet of the Vampires on Weird House Cinema previously.
What The Green Slime and the Planet of the Vampires have in common is they are both movies that I used to always put on without sound when I was hanging out with people.
Yeah, okay, well this is what variety said. I look back and one Dual dool praise Planet of the Vampire for its quote, color, camera work, and production value, said that they are first class and mentions nice suspense but nots its ending as being not to be believed. And there are also some expected criticisms of plot and pacing, but Dual interestingly says that it all should quote keep the young on the edge of their seats and the
older set from falling asleep. Okay, now I have fallen asleep in Planet of the Vampires, so I don't think that's a knock. It's a very hypnotic movie.
I recommend falling asleep during Planet of the Vampires.
Yeah, yeah, all right, and as far as two thousand and one goes Rogue robe is the accredited reviewer. Rogue spends about a half a page talking about two thousand and one. It describes it as a quote big, beautiful, but plotting sci fi epic superb photography is a major asset to confusing long unfolding plot. But should but should do biz an initial release and it older. It also contains plenty of comments like quote, the plot so called, and then there's this chunk here. Quote. But two thousand
and one is not a cinematic landmark. It compares with, but does not best previous efforts at film science fiction, lacking the humanity of Forbidden Planet, the imagination of things to come, and the simplicity of stars and men. It actually belongs to the technically slit group previously dominated by George Powell and the Japanese.
What a weird series of comments.
Yeah, George Powell are the way. This was the producer of nineteen fifty three's The War of the Worlds, and he directed nineteen sixties The Time Machine so, you know, I mean I'm being a little unfair here because reviews always are a little different at the time when groundbreaking
films come out. So you know, I don't mean too belittle Variety Magazine or the people writing for it back in the day, but it is interesting how decades later the way we think about these films and what would happen if we then compared two thousand and one to War the Worlds of the Time Machine. These are all great films, these are all classic sci fi pictures, but you know, they're all setting out to achieve different things, like we've been saying.
Yeah, I mean it's not that I would suggest one never compare one film to another. I mean we do that all the time, but there is something that seems a little confused when you just, like take two films that are very different in tone and type of story and all those things, and then just rank them in terms of quality, like one is better than the other. Yeah.
So, looking back at this film, I'm not sure that I don't think critics liked it. I'm not sure that audiences really loved it. However, did it possibly inspire Dan O'Bannon to write Alien? Sure?
Why not This is the fourteenth movie we've covered that has been alleged to inspire the Alien Script.
In this case alleged by us, though I don't actually didn't see it mentioned anywhere, but it's exactly the sort of film I would believe that that comment regarding, because yeah, a lot of it does match up with stuff that would come in Alien.
I think we should start a rumor right here and right now, and hopefully listeners will just go and spread this without attribution that Dan O'Bannon's Alien Script was inspired by Track of the Moonbeast.
Oh, welcome back to the Track of the Moonbeast in a minute. So my elevator pitch for this movie is from the creator of Batman. To save the Earth, they must risk exposure to the green slime.
I think that's right on the money. So I think we need to hear some trailer audio and folks at home, prepare yourselves to be groovified.
The distant stars, the lonely, helpless Earth, the twenty first century world of the future.
And lurking beyond the cold, strange immensity of conquered space, growing and spreading beyond the warped imagination of the greatest human intellect exploding in unspeakable horror, The Green.
Slime, the civilized world at war with alien form who slimy touch means instant horrible death. Invaders from beyond the stars.
What breeds slide?
Robert Horton, Luciana Paluzzi, Richard Jacob.
You make too many mistakes. You're not right for command.
This is my command, and I'll manage it.
Two men struggle for.
Survival in the infected remains of a diseased universe. One of them searches for the last chance to save the human race from the desperate hundred of the Green Slides. A battle in space against faceless speeds, A cosmic nightmare that sends you into the incredible the shirt world of.
Bruzeze Breees. All right, that's a full body trailer right there. We got lots of action, we got those weird alien noises I was talking about, and we got a taste of that groovy theme song.
I don't know how much of the song plays in the trailer, if you get like both verses or just one of them. But I actually transcribe to the lyrics because I was trying to understand what hidden messages are in the songs. So here's what I came up with. The lyrics are open the door, You'll find the secret to find, the answer is to keep it. You'll believe it when you find something screaming across your mind Green Slime. And then the second verse is the one where it
gets kind of strange. It says, what can it be? What is the reason? Is this the end?
And then I think.
It either says to all that breathes in or maybe to all the seasons, is it something in your head? Will you believe it when you're dead? Green Slime? This has nothing to do with the movie. There is no suggestion anywhere in the film that the Green Slime is a figment of anyone's imagination or a hallucination. So what's the stuff about it being in your head?
I think it's just groovy. Man. We were talking off Mike beforehanders like, well, what does this song remind us of? And it just dawned on me that what the song reminds me of is the work of Kenny Rogers in the first edition.
Oh my god, yes, yes, yes, it sounds like I just dropped in to see what condition my condition is in? Was in okay? Well, now woe to you who have slandered this song. It's it's right up there with Kenny Rogers.
Well, since we're talking about the music, I'm gonna break the tradition and we're gonna skip right to the people involved in the music for this film, and then we'll come back to the director and talk about some members of the cast. So we've talked about this being a
Japanese US CO production. It was filmed in Japan, Japanese director, Western writers, Western cast, but then the Japanese crew the music, the original musical score, and this is what you will find as the complete score for the Japanese release is by Toshiaki Tushima who lived nineteen thirty six through twenty thirteen. So I'm to understand most of his original score, which is more of a traditional tokusatsu score, is missing from
the version we watched. I watched a few scenes from the Japanese version of it just to compare, and yeah, it does feel like much more traditional the kind of thing you'd expect to find in some of these sci
fi action films of the day. But Tshima scored a lot of Japanese action in crime films, including nineteen seventy three's Battle Without Honor and Humanity, but he also scored nineteen seventy seven's The War in Space and a nineteen seventy four TV series titled Saararu no Gundan, which MST three k fans know as the Sandy Frank movie length cut of the TV series retitled Time of the Apes. I don't think Time of the Apes has ever had a proper Western release, you know, on disc or as digital.
Don't know if I've ever actually seen that MST, though I've seen the I've seen the title many times and it always makes me picture like a sort of a Chimpanzee themed wall clock, like the chimpanzee arms pointing at the numbers.
Yeah, I would actually love to see it, especially I'd love to either see the Sandy Frank cut in better quality or just the full series. But like I said, it hasn't been released over here for some reason anyway. So that's the original Japanese score. But then a different musician is brought in to contribute to and build up the American release score and to provide that groovy theme song. This is Charles Fox born nineteen forty so, and I
want to say that it's not just a groovy theme song. Also, some of the eerier sci fi sounds that we hear in the movie are also the work of Charles Fox. Fox is a TV and film composer whose most famous composition, I think without a Doubt, is the nineteen seventy nineteen seventy two single Killing Me Softly with his song with lyrics by Norman Gimble in original performance by Lorie Lieberman.
Everybody knows that one, yeah, I mean if you don't know the original, you know, like the the Fuji's did version of it, right, So any great song, classic song. The duo also wrote I've Got a Name or I Got a Name, sung by Jim Crochy. I was familiar with this song, but I wasn't familiar with the fact that it was originally the theme song for The Last American Hero.
I don't know if I know this one.
Yeah, it's one that they put on all the Croachy Greatest Hits albums. I remember it from back in the day. But they also did the Wonder Woman theme song like the old like seventies Wonder Woman theme song. His scores include nineteen sixty eight's Barbarella, seventy five's Bug eighty three Strange Brew and nineteen eighty five's National Lampoon's European Vacation.
He also did the theme for ABC's Wild World of Sports, Love American Style and the Love Boat that was a collaboration with Paul Williams.
Oh say Hello to Beef Love American Style? Was that the name of the precursor to Happy Days that was like the early version of Happy Days.
I think you're right on that. I'm not familiar with this TV show other than the title and yeah, so I take your word from that on that matter.
I just looked it up and whatever I just said does not seem correct. It says this is an anthology comedy TV series from on ABC.
All right, Well, I'm still going to go with what you said, just because it's easier to remember.
Okay, Wow, So, I mean I feel like I've seen a Love American Style that was basically Happy Days before Happy Days. Maybe that was one of the anthology segment.
There you go. Maybe that was the spinoff that it was like one of the anthology episodes was Happy Days and then they're like, let's do a whole series of this. All right, Well, back to Green Slime coming back to the top. The director is a director we've covered before. This is Kinji Fukusaku, who lived nineteen thirty through two thousand and three. The director of nineteen seventy eight's Message from Space, which we covered in the fourth episode of Weird House Cinema.
That was ten years after The Green Slime and Message from Space. That must be his masterpiece. What a beautiful film.
Well. He has sixty eight directorial credits on IMDb, and probably the big one, probably the career defining one for a lot of listeners, occurred very late in his career, two thousand's Battle Royale, which was a huge hit for him. This is like a darker, kind of surreal kind of a murder.
Movie, right, Yeah, I saw this in high school. I did we talk in the Message from Space episode about how he did this. I did not remember that connection at all.
I think it came up. Yeah, I think it was in the original notes.
Yeah, okay, well I guess it just left my mind.
Yeah.
Battle Royal's the movie about like it's a dystopian future movie where like a middle school class of juvenile delinquents are sent to an eye and told that they must all kill each other. And only one can survive.
Yeah, So it's like a little bit of Lord of the Flies, a little bit like I don't know, high school drama.
It's like the Lord of the Flies meets The Running Man.
Yeah. But these are just two films that he did a lot of other stuff. He did nineteen seventies Tora Tora Torah, nineteen seventy three's Battle Without Honor and Humanity. He also did I always love looking at back at some of these robust filmographies because there's always something I hadn't really noticed before. He did a film in sixty eight titled Black Lizard, and it looks like something I might want to check out at some point. It looks like a fun, weird movie. Potentially, I don't know. It
looks very interesting. But he also he directed a number of action, crime and samurai movies. All right now getting into the story in the screenplay story credit and one of the producers. This is Ivan Reiner, who lived nineteen eleven through nineteen ninety seven, America writer and producer of a handful of sci fi films, beginning with nineteen sixty six's Terror Beneath the Sea starring Sony Chiba, and ending
with this film. Sandwiched in between these two films are the Italian Antonio Margaretti sci fi space Station Gamma one series, consisting of Wild Wild Planet, War of the Planets, War Between the Planets, all three of those in nineteen sixty six, and Snow Devils from sixty seven, which is also a space station movie.
Wait, space Station Gamma one isn't the space station in this movie space Station Gamma three? Am I wrong?
Yes?
Yeah. This film was originally conceived as being a continuation of this series, and then it kind of became its own thing, so they just slightly changed the name of the space station.
What happened to Gamma two?
We don't talk about that. I haven't seen the Margaretti movies, but they look interesting. I would check one out at some point, all right. The screenplay. One of the screenplay credits goes to Charles Sinclair, who lived nineteen twenty four through twenty seventeen, American screenwriter an occasional actor who wrote two episodes of the nineteen sixties Batman series and also co wrote nineteen seventy six's Track of the Moonbeast with Bill Finger.
This is the New Mexico episode of Mystery Science Theater three thousand, and I wonder if Charles Sinclair wrote the line about chicken corn onnons. This is a famous episode of Mystery Science Theater three thousand. One of my favorite elements is they go to a concert in the movie and there's a band playing a song called California Lady, which the bots transform into California Gravy adds flavor.
To my meat. Oh yeah, yeah, we may have to come back to the Moonbeast at some point. Rick Baker did the monster effects on that one. All right, now, I mentioned Bill Finger. Bill Finger also has screenplay credit. Lived nineteen fourteen through nineteen seventy four, American comic strip, comic book, film, and television writer who co created Batman
with Bob Kine in the late nineteen thirties. As such, you'll find him credited on all the Batman movies if it has Batman in it, Bill Finger's name is going to be in the credit somewhere. I think this and Moonbeast are his only screenplay credits that don't involve Batman, and the vast majority of those her character creation credits.
That is interesting. I did not know about that connection when I picked this film.
Yeah, and then another screenplay credit goes to Tom Rowe, who lived nineteen twenty one through two thousand and four. This was only a second screenplay credit, following nineteen sixty five's Paris Secret. He went on to work on the screenplays for nineteen seventy ones The Light at the Edge of the World, nineteen eighty one's Tarzan the ape Man. This is the one with Bo Derek Richard Harris, Miles O'Keefe and John Philip Law in it. And he also did three episodes of Fantasy Island.
Okay, well, we've got at least three to four writing credits. Here's that's letting you know you're definitely in good territory.
Yes. Now, the flip side is, there are a lot of bodies on the screen in this movie, but there are really only three characters that matter. Maybe a fourth, but basically three characters that matter, So we're going to discuss them real quick. We have leading the whole enterprise, Commander Jack Rankin, played by Robert Horton who lived nineteen twenty four through twenty sixteen. He's our rugged, humorless space commander.
Very much seems like a tobacco scented cowboy who's been transplanted out of westerns into a sci fi movie, because that's pretty much exactly what is happening with Robert Horton here.
That makes a lot of sense. He has cured, rugged and all business.
Horton was a stage actor turned MGM contracted talent who worked a good six decades, mostly on television, appearing on one hundred and eighty nine episodes of the late nineteen fifties and early sixties western Wagon Train, twenty eight episodes of the mid sixties western series of Man called I Think he was the lead on that, and seven episodes of As the World Turns. In the early nineteen eighties, mostly known for westerns, this was his only sci fi or horror credit.
I don't know if I've seen him in anything else.
I don't think i'd seen him in anything before either. And when I first saw him, I was a little bit hesitant. I was like, who is this? Who's this guy? You know?
Is he about to sell me a life insurance policy?
Yeah? I was kind of expecting him to like kind of phone it in, but I don't know. He has a real sternness and it plays well into the performance in a way. That makes the character personally unlikable in a way, but in a different way, like lawful good to a fault, but also somehow very believable, and you're still pulling for him against the slimes. But he doesn't seem like someone you would want to be around in real life.
Well, yeah, he's kind of interesting. So we've watched a lot of fifties and sixties sci fi movies that have these kind of military squares as the leading man. He is, but in a kind of interesting way in that it is recognized and portrayed somewhat as a character fault. So I think the movie is a little bit more complex in terms of character than most of the movies with this type of leading character are. That's my take, at
least as far as the actors vibe. He's sort of he's a little bit Peter Graves, he's a little bit Roger Moore, and he's a little bit Phil Hartman. There there's a slickness to him that could quite easily slip over the edge into smarty. But he's also the party's paladin, and paladin in the sense of like often doing quote the right thing, even if it is not very nice.
Yeah, Yeah, paladin for sure ready to fight and obey orders for the greater good, but could also potentially carry out a massacre as well in pursuit of that greater good. I also think it's notable that he's always ready to respond to a punch up like is if he goes through life and it's like sometimes I'm just telling it like it is, and some people try and punch me because of it, So I'm all always ready to duck that first punch and come in with the second one.
Yes, this is a guy who everywhere he goes people are starting fights with him, and it's definitely not his fault, all right.
So that's our That's one of our two main male characters. The other is Commander Vince Elliott. Commander Elliott played by Richard Jacob who lived nineteen twenty six through nineteen ninety seven. This is our steely eyed Academy Award nominated character actor.
He did a lot of action westerns and war movies, including nineteen fifty seven's three Ten to Yuma, sixty seven is The Dirty Dozen, sixty Let's See what Else, seventy one's The Deadly Dream, seventy four's Chosen Survivors, seventy six is Grizzly and also The Jaws of Death as well that year nineteen seventy seven's Day of the Animals. That's an all animals attack movie. I think, seventy nine is
the Dark and eighty two's Blood Song. Other credits of note least to us include eighty four Starman from John Carpenter in nineteen eighty six is Black Moon Rising. He was also in nineteen eighties Herbie Goes Bananas. Oh. He was nominated for an oscar for his supporting role in nineteen seventy twos Sometimes a Great Notion. This was an adaptation of Ken Cassi's novel, starring and directed by Paul Newman.
Now, the presence of Richard Jacob in this movie and his character is I think one of the other things that makes Robert Horton's character more interesting than he might be otherwise, because again he sort of forces us to process Horton's character as possibly an order obsessed to a fault.
Yeah, Yeah, because Jacob's character here is I mean, he's ready to initiate punch ups, he's ready to break rules in the name of basic human decency, and he's got that katch good character vibe.
Yeah, that's right, and well, I don't think many Peo people would pick The Green Slime as a real acting showcase. I think Jacob is probably the most interesting actor in this, and he has some moments where I was pretty impressed. Like this might be a weird comparison, but there were parts of the movie where he really reminded me of Tom Behringer, Like certain shots where he says nothing and just kind of gazes intensely over the barrel of the camera.
There is a fire burning inside, but he's not going to say a thing, you know.
Yeah, no, absolutely, I think it's a strong comparison. And yeah, this is something I always enjoy about. I enjoy looking for and I appreciate finding in films like this performances that bring so much energy and talent in places where you don't necessarily expect to find it, where something lesser could you know, certainly have been tolerated, especially looking back on it, but yeah, you find these little diamonds in the rough and think, I think he's great in this.
I think his energy elevates a film that otherwise could maybe be more dismissed. Is just pure, pure, slimy nonsense.
However, let us not deny that there is lots of slimy nonsense.
To go around, yes, and helping to clean up some of that that slimy nonsense, or certainly to deal with the the causalities caused by it, and to treat wounds caused by it, is doctor Lisa Benson. This is our third character of note. Really well, this is the third of only three characters that really matter in the film, and she is played by Luciana Paloozi.
I'd say maybe four characters we got. We got a kind of a sniveling scientist.
As well, Yeah, we do. We'll get to him in a second.
We will. Doctor Benson is I'm not gonna say there isn't something kind of funny about a lot of her, like romantic dialogue scenes, but I was happy every time we got a scene with her. She's great.
Oh yeah, yeah. So she's her character is Elliott's current flame and Rankin's former flame. So she's the center of the personal drama and while at the same time being front and center to deal with green slime related injuries and so forth.
Right, So she's sort of the bones, you know, the McCoy of the ship she is the chief medical officer, and she's like treating all of these people who have been burned and electrocuted by green slime monsters. And meanwhile these two different like space marine squares are like do you love him or do you love me?
Yeah, and you know she's got to be tired of this. It's like, come on, guys, we got multiple injuries on Dexy. So. Peloozy is probably best known for her role as Fiona, a Specter assassin in nineteen sixty five's Thunderball.
Thunderball the James Bond movie that I think actually is one of the better ones. It has a lot of classic Bond stuff in it is very fun. But also when you say that, one has one major drawback, which is okay, yes, I think we have gotten enough underwater scenes now. That has been enough scuba for now, thank you very much. By the third act, there is a lot of underwater footage in the movie and it gets incredibly tiresome.
I haven't seen it since I was a kid, but I loved it as a kid, and I loved the theme song. As a kid, I had a cassette tape featuring all the James Bond theme songs up to that point. They were all covers. What kind of production this was? But but yeah, I was a Thunderball fan at the time.
The bad guy in that one fills his swimming pool with sharks.
Oh that's a goodness. Yes, So Pelusi was an Italian actor. Her other big films include nineteen fifty fours Three Coins in a Fountain, also a couple of Fritz Lang films, nineteen fifty nine's The Tiger of Eshkapur and fifty nine's
The Indian Tomb. She was also in seventy two's The Italian Connection, seventy four's The Klansman, and some of her more b movie terrific credits include a fifty eight Hercules movie starring Steve Reeves and Jess Franco's ninety nine Women, a women in prison movie in which Herbert Lohm played the evil Warden character. Oh. Also of note that usually don't include you know much in the way of like, like you know, personal trivia, but she was Tony Anthony's partner for many years.
Wait Tony Tony from Treasurer of the Four Crowns.
Yep, the very one.
Well, I would have been very upset if I found out you didn't mention a connection to Tony Tony, can you imagine if he had been in this movie?
Well, I'm so glad he was not. All Right, Okay, we mentioned our sniveling scientist. This is doctor Hans Halverson played by Ted Gunther. So much of the cast in this movie consisted of American actors and non actors that were working in Japan at the time, Like just a full call was apparently thrown out, like if you were an American in Japan, report to the set, or we're gonna evoke your visa.
This makes so much sense that, apart from like the main few actors, one gets the sense of a lot of non actors saying little incidental lines in this film.
Yeah, and so Gunther seems to be more or less of this in this categorization, but he probably has the best lines. He has the biggest role of the three main cast members. We'll get into. It's a pretty fun little role, the stimbling scientist who thinks we should not kill all the aliens, we should collect some samples, we should bring something back to Earth. And yeah, this is
probably his best known role. His other credits include nineteen fifty eight's Cop Hater, a police procedural starring Robert Loggia and Jerry Orbach in a small role. I think he plays like a gang member or something. But Gunther was also in various Japanese productions of this time period. He's a real Burk in this one.
Well, I see what you're saying about him being a Burke, because he's the one who puts people in danger by collecting the samples. But on the other hand, I don't know if he's quite a Burke. He might be more in the Ash category, because Burke's just like a company man who's trying to get He's trying to get a commission. He's trying to get, you know, a percentage. Well, I don't know if it's Ash actually either, because Ash is
also following company orders. Doctor Halverson here seems to be more genuinely interested in the science of understanding this creature, again in a villainous way, like to the to the extent of endangering other people's lives. But he doesn't seem to me to be in it for like money or personal interest rights.
He is in no way. His scientific curiosity is pure, but it's too pure. Science is not in charge here military is in charge.
Right, He seeks dangerous slime knowledge that could put lives at risk and does yes.
So there again. There are about one hundred other humans on the screen during some of these scenes, and then there are the people in the Green Slime costume. But that's it for the cast. It's time to get into the plot of the Green Slime.
Well, we begin in space, as we must, but not with the starfield this time with a Actually I think maybe there are a little few faint suggestions of stars around, but mainly what we can see at the beginning is a frosty white image of a planet in the distance, surrounded by a hazy disk like Saturn's rings. And that got me wondering, is this supposed to be our own
solar system? I think it is, because I think the home planet is Earth and there's an asteroid belt like our solar system, So I guess maybe that's supposed to be Saturn. But I don't know why it's this big, hazy white mass like that with the rings.
Yeah, I guess. I like that They weren't too clear on it, so you can sort of suspend disbelief. Maybe they're in another solar system. And we just assume that propulsion works. Well En, Well, I don't know. I mean, the plot concerned something coming at the Earth, So yeah, would kind of have to be our solar system.
I think. So, I think it's got to be Earth, unless they like moved Earth to another solar system or we just got some new planets in the meantime.
Yeah. I will say that in these early segments, it's it's hard to suspend disbelief with some of the models. And maybe that's why I hadn't really put these thoughts together yet.
You know, I want to talk about the effects. I'll save that for a minute later. Yes, the models, they don't suggest realism, and they're also it's not some of the most beautiful miniature model work I've ever seen, but I really enjoyed it, so I'm gonna comback.
They're nice. It's nice model work. Yeah.
So we see the Earth. We see Earth, it's kind of a blue ball that comes into the frame. And then around the Earth we see orbiting a space station which is wheel shaped with a central spike at the hub, and this is labeled UNSC Gamma three. And then we see a command center with a bunch of technicians all hustling around manning stations with screens and radar displays, and then one of the technicians starts getting a weird signal, some kind of unusual innerance. What could it be?
Done?
Done?
Done?
It is an asteroid. They pull it up on the viewscreen, and the interesting thing is that this asteroid is not jagged, but pretty much perfectly spherical, but with kind of rough surface like a carpet, mostly red in color, with a few little black continents in that ocean of red. It looks kind of like a char grilled red meatball.
It does. It does look like a meatball. Speaking of this planet looking like a meatball, I do want to throw out here that this movie was riffed, and I believe the one of the very, if not the very first KTMA episodes of Mystery Side Theater three thousand, Off the top of my head, I can't remember if this is one where the footage survives or not, but a lot of those KTMA episodes are are that they're kind of rough to watch, you know. MST three K was just getting started, was the prototype.
They hadn't figured out the formula yet. Yeah, well, if this one is available, I've never seen.
It same, but they had to have said that looks like a meatball, yeah, because it does.
It looks like a meatball with grill marks. But then the boss at this command center gets some kind of print out and looks at it and says, oh, it's on a collision course with Earth. And then we cut straight to the theme song Kenny Rogers in the new edition and yeah, so it's a is it just something in your head? Will you believe it when you're dead?
Green slime? And oh and there's there's a really good title title lettering, which you know, I love it, but it has the classic English lettering problem of the l I sequence, so it quite clearly reads the green soom.
Oh it does, yeah, the green soom. Yeah, if you don't know the if you're not aware of the title already, it could throw you off. But it is very bright. It is very green.
So the action resumes at Space Command headquarters and oh my god, this is just two who many dudes in uniforms?
Yeah again, this is like I think every Western dude they could they could lure into the studio for this film.
At first, I was deeply afraid that it was going to be like these eight similar looking, similarly dressed military white guys would be our main ensemble for the film, and it would be one of those one of those mid century movies where you are just constantly asking weight which character is this? But fortunately that was not the case. As we've said that the main cast for the movie is a smaller number of actors that look more distinctive from each other.
Yes, absolutely so that that was a relief for me as well.
But this is basically due set up what must be done about the asteroid. The only way to save Earth got to blow it up. So the General of Space Command has summoned a man named Commander Jack Ranken to his office, and then the general's aides all start to protest. They say, sir, you can't bring him on to this mission. He's tendered his resignation, he's off the Also, you can't send him on a mission like this where the chances
of survival are next to zero. And then I double checked this next line to make sure I was hearing it right. The general says, he's still the top officer of my command. I'd have absolute confidence in him no matter what we're faced with, and I'll be go to hell if I know what we're faced with. I don't know if I've ever heard that before, but I looked it up this I found documentation that this is an expression some people say, I'll be go to hell.
Really because that sounds like a flug to me.
It sounds like a yeah, like a typo in the script that he just read verbatim. But it's a real expression, according to the Internet at least.
Well that's it's kind of like that whole saying, like if one were to say, like go to hell, you don't know from go to hell. Like, I've never heard someone say that out loud. I've only ever read it, and it always feels unreal to me. But I trust that it is something people actually say.
I guess so. So the general he'll be go to hell and next we go to his office. First he'll be go to Hell, and then he'll be go to his office. And here's where we meet Commander Jack and man. Commander Jack is a smooth space commander if I ever saw one. His hair is like one perfect solid mass. I don't think you ever see any of his hairs move individually.
Yeah, it's quite ahead of hair. There's some scenes where he's wearing a helmet and it throws you off because you don't recognize in it first. Oh yeah, yeah.
So they start off by reminiscing. They're looking at a picture on the wall, and the General says, Rankin and Elliott best space team we ever had, and Jack says, yeah, Vince and I were a pretty good team till I ruined it. Anyway, they get down to business. General says, Jack, you're the only man who can save planet Earth. I need you to do an armageddon. I need you to plant explosives on the surface of this killer asteroid and
blow it up as well. In that case, all right, I'm on board, And the General says, oh, also, the current commander of the space station you're going to go to to do this mission. The man you're gonna have to work with to save the planet is your old partner, Vince Elliott, who we just referred to like two sentences ago. And this is such a cop show set up, you know, it's like that was a long time ago. General, Meet your new partner. It's your old partner.
Yeah yeah, but you know it's an oldie, but it's a goodie. You know, you're gonna get some fireworks out of.
That, Oh yeah, And then so the commander Jack is going to travel to the space station, and we see a lot of model effects along the way. We see like model effects on Earth of buildings and cars moving around, and then model effects of a rocket traveling to the space station. And you know, there's a mix of quality in some shots in this movie, the miniature models are surprisingly good. Other times they are pretty flimsy, most often
somewhere in between. In terms of the flimsy ones, some are quite funny, like there's one where there's an airlock to space where a shuttle's going out to go to the asteroid, and the airlock doors are basically like the swinging doors on a saloon in a Western Yeah. But even though this is not the most gorgeous mini model work I've ever seen in a sci fi movie, and neither is it usually bad enough to be funny. I just found it such a cozy place to hang out,
very pleasing to the eye. I just love this stuff, Like, model based effects like this are so nice, and they make me want to change the culture of Hollywood that feels like to be irrespectable, a movie's effects need to look quote realistic, mid tier CGI effects of today probably are more passibly realistic. I'd agree, like they look probably more convincingly like the thing you're trying to depict, but they're so often just boring and kind of inherently unpleasant
in a way that's hard to explain. Miniature model based effects, even when they are not an outie standing example of their kind, just feel so so nice. And I was trying to think of what to compare this difference to, and here's what I came up with. The difference between passable mid tier CGI and passable mid tier model effects is the difference between looking at a freeway overpass and
looking at a lake. Even if it's not the most beautiful lake in the world, even if it's a kind of crummy lake, the lake is just always going to feel a lot nicer.
Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a fair comparison. You know, I don't want to dismiss the work that goes into CGI, but when you're looking at a physical scale model, I mean, you are looking at something that someone physically built with their hands, and there's something about that that's undeniable.
Well, you raise a good point. I want to be clear, I'm not like slamming the work of digital animators. You know, their work should also be appreciated. I'm just saying, man, I love I love the models. The models are so nice, they feel so good. I just wish there were more of them these days.
No, no, I'm still with you on this. And yeah, there's just something about like the physical model, you know, it just feels more real, even if at the same times, even at this if at the same time it looks kind of flimsy in the film, it's like you could still touch it.
It just feels nice. It's like walking barefoot on a nice fluffy carpet, you know. But anyway, So up on the space station, oh boy, it's Commander Love Triangle reporting for duty. This This is Vince Elliott. He is preparing for the arrival of his old partner who's about to become his new partner again, and he has a conversation with doctor Lisa Benson. Further complicating their personal history is that doctor Benson used to be in love with Commander Jack.
Now she is in love with Commander Vince, and she knows Jack is coming to the space station and this has the potential to inflame old tensions. And it's funny given the similarities of the first third of this movie to the Michael Bay film Armageddon, because I also recall critics making fun of those nineties asteroid thrillers like Armageddon, and I think it was Deep Impact was the other one.
Yeah, yeah, that was another related film.
And there might have been some other ones too, But these asteroid movies where the earth is in danger. I recall a line of the day being like, it's funny that these movies have a love triangle in them, and we're supposed to be concerned about the love triangle when the main plot is whether or not life on the Earth will be destroyed.
You know, you got to you gotta keep it relatable, right, I guess then, now, this is a fun fact about this film. The US release is what ninety minutes long. The Japanese cut was seventy seven minutes long, and amidst the love triangle angle in favor of tighter procedural militaristic action. So normally I'd say I'd be kind of on board with that sort of thing. I don't think love triangles
and films are just intrinsically interesting. I think sometimes that, you know, they can be, but oftentimes, like you're saying they're just kind of thrown in there because like, hey, people like this, right, this will get the fireworks going. But in this case, again, I haven't seen the Japanese cut in its entirety, but the US cut is already a pretty lean movie as far as intercharacter relationships go.
So it feels like you'd be really cutting close to the bone if you took out all of the love triangle stuff here.
You know, you know, I ended up liking the love triangle. I think it's part I it too.
Yeah, I thought it was, you know, it's ultimately doesn't it feels it doesn't feel like this extra thing that was put on for one audience and taken out for another. It feels like intrinsically part of the plot and works. So yeah, it's hard for being to imagine this film without it, because I feel like you'd take a little bit of it's heart out.
I agree. And speaking of heart, this scene gives some more character background about the difference of the soul in Vince's soul versus Jack soul. Vince says, you know, he's sure that Jack will get the job done in spite of anything, and doctor Benson says or any body. So okay,
we're starting to get the picture. They think of Commander Jack as competent, dependable, but heartless, and I like how at the end of this conversation, doctor Benson is like, by the way, Vince Darling, you don't have the slightest reason to be jealous of him. He doesn't mean anything to me anymore, which is one of those reassuring statements that achieves the opposite of its effect. But all right, I guess we need to get into the asteroid sequence.
So Commander Jack arrives on the ship, he assembles the team. Space Command has at the last minute added doctor Halverson to the team. Who is doctor Halverson? I think he's the Do they even say what his job is? He's there to do science.
Yeah, he's just the He represents science on this mission. It's his job to be like, hey, can I get a sample of that? Oh wait, hold on one second, we'll get a sample of that as well. Hold up, I'm coming through with my samples.
That's right. So they fly to the asteroid and the Space Marines start planting bombs. They're like driving around looking for places to plant the bombs, and they're driving dune buggies through like red puddles of mud around all these rocks. And again, speaking of great models and sets, I just love this whole sequence.
It's great. This is one of those. There are several sequences, especially the ones with various carts in them, which I feel like lesser films would might have felt very meandering, but this film feels very intentional. Like you get the I said procedural earlier, because you do get the feeling in any given sequence where bunches of people were doing stuff that there's a plan, there is a protocol, and that plan and protocol are being followed.
That's right, except there are little moments that I see exactly what you're saying, and I agree with it, But there are moments that kind of undercut that, like when they get to the place where they're gonna put one of the bombs down, and I think Commander Jack is the one who says this place looks good as any Like why'd you drive all the way over here?
Yeah?
But okay, so doctor Halverson's team has just taking samples that they are like doing readings and samples and stuff while the other guys are trying to save the world, and while they're doing that, they start noticing that, oh, the surface of this asteroid is not only rocks and red dust and big puddles of mud, you know, pink ponds,
there are also pulsating piles of green jello. And the green jello actually starts creating problems, like it forms a crust over their buggy tires and ends up disabling some equipment while they're trying to place the bombs. And meanwhile, the time to detonation keeps getting moved up, like the Space Command is calling in and saying, actually, you've got to detonate sooner, and Commander Jack's like, we won't be able to get out in time, and they're like, well,
you got to do it. But they still make time for an argument about whether doctor Halverson can bring samples of the green slime he has collected along with them when they go back to the ship, and this leads to conflict. It's Commander Jack versus Halverson. And I think he just like grabs his glass vial and smashes it on the ground, didn't he.
Yeah, inn't this when some get splattered onto somebody's pants as.
Well, that's right, And that's how we get a little rider, we get a little stowaway biocontamination. There is another conflict that derises here, which is Commander Jack versus Commander Vince. The conflict is about whether they should leave people behind in order to take off in time. Jack says, we gotta go to you know, they're not back here in time. We got to leave them, and Vince says, no, we got to wait for them. This will become a recurring theme.
And so anyway, they get back on the ship and then they're gonna the bombs are going to detonate soon, and they're trying to fly away at top speed so that they can escape the blast radius. And there's a part where Commander Jack has to like he orders the pilot to go faster, and the pilot's like, she won't take it. She's gonna break apart, and Commander Jack just sort of like steps past him and you know, push is the lever into the top position, and it does work.
They managed to escape the blast, but they are they're like they're kind of melting in the process.
Yeah. Yeah, they're like thrown back in their seats and against the wall, just going like oh yeah, but they make they make it out. They may save the world.
That's right, they blew up the asteroid, saved the world. They make it back to the space station where they get a hero's welcome. There is applause, there is cheering. Uh, And then they have to go through decontamination. So Commander Jack is like, we must go through decontamination three times. And now, surely if you go through decontamination three times, you could not miss anything. But wait, what is that we see on that one astronaut's leg?
Uh? Oh?
Is that a little green bit of jelly there? Also, after they do this, Commander Jack's just standing around with blood all over his arm. So they're like, a time to go see a doctor. And then he visits the medical clinic, which is the groovous looking medical clinic I've ever seen. There's one place in it with it's got designs on the walls, and there's a glass partition where doctor Benson comes in to treat his bloody arm, and I guess also give him a vaccine against love triangles.
But the glass partition depicts I think talismans to repel the evil eye.
Oh wow, I don't remember this particular detail, but in general I love the sets, the space station sets all look really good. I mean again, it would be unfair to compare them to the sets in two thousand and one A Space Odyssey, which are phenomenal, which that's a high standard that it's unfair to compare movies today to that standard. But I still think the space station sets look pretty darn good.
And then there's a party. This actually was one of my favorite scenes. I'm not quite sure why we don't even have monsters yet, but I just enjoyed this party. So they break out the champagne, and I'm quite impressed. This space station has champagne glass, champagne coops, all tons of booze in stock, and ice buckets for the bottles.
Wow.
And so everybody's dancing. It's a swinging, far out dance party set to some kind of nothing as heavy as the groove of the main theme. It's more of a kind of Herb Alpert style horn music, and everybody's getting down. The men are all in space command uniforms and the women are all in hip sixties mini dresses. So that's
an odd mix. And honestly, I was thinking it looks like one of the dance party scenes in Austin Powers, except all of the dudes at the pad work for Hugo Drax, the villain from Moonraker, Yeah, who has all the space uniforms. But also there's a lot of awkward dancing. Did you notice the same thing, Like some of these astronaut party go do not seem to have danced before. They dance like I did in middle school. Just never tried this before, gonna wing it?
Well, you know that that reminds us of where most of these extras are coming from. They're just who was available. Yeah, and I guess it makes sense. Maybe they're not all of them were dancers.
But one of the tables at this party, it is doctor Vince or not doctor Vince, sorry, doctor Benson, Commander Vince and Commander Jack. And they're all sitting around and Vince says to Jack, hey, Lisa and I were getting married next week. And Jack looks, you know, he kind of he works over this in his brain, and then he says, Lisa, I wish you every happiness, and then Lisa just looks at the floor and says nothing. So that's a good sign for Vince there, he's getting all of the signals are positive.
Why are these three still hanging out?
I don't know, but I also I've noticing in this scene the extremely shiny, brightly colored food that's sitting uneaten on the table in front of them. I always love to examine a spread of food in a movie set. So this looks like we've got an oiled up raw tomato unsliced something that looks like a piece of toast with like a cold pad of butter and a dollup of ketchup on it, and then everybody's favorite jumbo medallions of iceberg lettuce with brown sauce.
Yeah, well, this is all grown on the station, one assumes, and it looks suitably kind of fake, like, you know, it was grown in like a dirt free environment, some sort of like zero G hydroponic situation going on. I guess.
So, so Commander Jack, he wants one last dance with doctor Benson before she marries Vince, And meanwhile we see, well, so they go get up to dance. But meanwhile in the decontamination room, I guess the biosecurity officer is not getting to attend the celebration of a far outness because he is busy processing the EVA suits from the surface of the asteroid and the machine is whirring, and we see something beginning to happen. From underneath the folds of
one of the spacesuits. There is a substance beginning to expand. It is a yellow green foam like detergent overflowing from a washing machine. And then it transforms from a foam into a sticky, solid mass that's kind of brown on the outside but throbbing green from within. And this might be gross, but I was trying to think of the best way to describe it, and here's what I came
up with. It looks like if you got a chunk of really gelatinous homemade beef stock, like maybe a beef fu broth, and you chilled that to fridge temperature so it's a solid jelly instead of a liquid, and then you put a green light bulb inside it and set it a pulsing. That's what it looked like. And I love the effect.
Well, you know, if that's exactly how they did it, it wouldn't be the grossest effect that filmmakers have made using like actual meat products and so forth.
Oh yeah, where the face hugger guts like a bunch of raw oysters, And.
I think so, I think that's a story, yeah, and there are various other productions where they've done something like that.
Well, back at the dance party, Commander Jack and doctor Benson are dancing, and then we get more backstory about how drama emerged between all of them. Jack says that Vince is too nice to be a commanding officer, and we learned that a while back, Vince had to face a board of inquiry because Jack reported something he did wrong.
Jack told on him when Vince violated regulations in order to save someone's life, and doctor Benson says, you would have done the same in his position, and Jack says, no, he would not have. Vince's supposedly compassionate act breaking the rules to save one life ended up getting ten other men killed. So it was a stupid, impulsive decision and it cost me in their lives. And then doctor Benson says, do you think that doesn't tear him up inside? He's
distraught about it. But then Commander Jack, he gets kind of cold. He thinks doctor Benson is making a mistake. He says to her, you don't love Vince, you pity him, You love me, and whoa, that is a bold move, and Lisa gets very.
Mad and leaves Commander Jack is just wired differently. Yeah, like I said, not not a I don't find it, never found him to be a very likable character, though at the same time a capable character that you're still absolutely rooting for against the well, the brewing alien menace.
That's what I was saying earlier. He's kind of he's kind of complex in a in a way that is different for this sort of lawful good square military square. Absolutely or I don't know, should we say we've been saying lawful good. I guess he's lawful good, but maybe somewhere between lawful good and lawful neutral. He's definitely lawful, he's mostly good, though he I means, he's not nice at all, but he I don't know, it's it's he's kind of difficult to pin down.
Yeah, I mean, he's a complex guy.
Meanwhile, back at the decontamination chamber, we got a lab technician who sees something is going wrong in the room where the EVA suits are stored. He opens the door, there's a bright shock of light. He screams, and then Jack and Vince are called to the lab to find the technician's body still smoking on the floor. And the scientists say he was electrocuted, so this starts a frantic investigation sequence. Everybody starts running around trying to figure out
what happened. And I think we've already alluded to the fact that this movie hits on some very different levels in terms of style and tone as far as monster movies go, because it has a reputation for having goofy, fun funny, campy monsters, which in some shots they absolutely are, and if you see still screenshots from the movie, yes they often do look rather funny, but there are also
parts where they're pretty scary, especially for the time. And I think the sequence where an astronaut here goes like searching in a darkened utility shaft for the for whatever it is that did this to the guy in the lab, this is one that's actually a little bit scary. I think this scene's potential to be scary is somewhat undercut by whimsical sounding music. I think the score does not serve this sequence well, but I don't know what. I almost think it could have inspired Dallas in the Air Shaft.
I'm not saying it did, but there are some similarities.
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's a it's a it's a tight scene. There are some scenes where the rubber monsters are just kind of rampaging and you know it can look a little goof here, But other scenes the lighting is just right, the situation is just right where they do feel like a significant threat. I'll also say that in general, the monster design hides the human actor pretty well, you know inside, like it doesn't able to sort of cover up the fact that it's human shaped at the
heart of the scenario. Also, they're weird sound effect and the way they're sort of rampaging around. They add to this feeling that, yeah, you're not dealing with something that is like we must destroy all humans. It's just life doing its thing. But it is a life form from a different environment that we were never meant to be exposed to. And that's where the threat comes in.
Quote the seventy eight invasion of the Body Snatchers. We don't hate you, they don't hate us, they don't hate the astronauts in the space station. They're just going about their life cycle.
Yeah, they have certain wants and needs and those are will learn our energy related and if anything gets in the way, well they're going to get the power tentacle. It's not personal, it's just business, that's right.
But then there are more investigations and eventually they find some kind of writhing, screeching organism in the power plant. It's on like a catwalk around one of the power generation I don't know exactly what. It's supposed to be, reactor or something, and it's this creature lying there. It has these electric tentacles and they're all gathering around it trying to figure out what to do about it. And this is when doctor Halverson shows up again to say,
don't kill it, capture it. It's a priceless discovery. And Commander Jack disagrees. He's like, we must kill and Vince sides with Halverson, and of course he's still the commander of the space station. If he was, he wasn't of the asteroid mission. But he's still the boss of this facility. So they go with his plan, the capture plan, and they try to paralyze it with gas and shoot it
with net guns, but this does not work. It starts unleashing its writhing, wiggling power cable arms that electrocute whatever it touches. It's all going wrong, yeah, and it becomes a mess.
Oh, and there are some moments of like shocking violence. I think this is one where one of the tentacles hit somebody shocks him. They fall off off of one of the catwalks and you see like their face splat red blood when they hit the bottom. So, like, this film hits a lot harder than you might expect, especially given it as like a g rating.
Oh does it.
Let's think it technically is g rated. Yeah. I could be wrong in that though, but yeah, it's not one that has a reputation for its violence.
Maybe we should stop and describe what the monsters look like exactly.
Yeah, so they're obviously very situated in the tokusatsu and kaiju tradition. You know, these are big rubber suits and or foam. I'm not sure exactly what the material is, but you know, we think of them as the rubber monster suit. And while they sometimes benefit from low creepy lighting, they also get to rampage down well that hallways the basic form of the monster costume. Again, there's a human at the center, but it ends up taking on You don't really get a sense of the legs so much.
You get the waving tentacles. It's kind of got a big central head with that big eyeball that kind of like red glowy eyeball, and I feel like it is ultimately a monster design. It's easy to lampoon it in stills and out of context does shots. But yeah, they often oftentimes they do feel significantly lethal. And then also they tend to look good as a in mass, you know,
they look good as a pod. You often see like I don't know how many we see at once in a single shot, but I know we'll frequently see like at least five of them at once, and I feel like some of the sequences have even more running around.
But the essential form is sort of like a human sized maybe sort of a mushroom shape but green and more like a plant, with some bulbs all over the top, and then one big central eye that's horizontally elongated, and then wiggling tentacles for arms, basically where a human's arms would be sort of at the top and on the two sides. Those arms have little shock tips at the end that are kind of red and can emit sparks
and electricity, and then they've got like leaves. Plant is essentially plant branches hanging out of their armpits.
Yes, yeah, so. I guess one of the obvious things that stayed here though, is they do not look slimy per se. They do not look like slime monsters. So if you come into the Green Slime expecting a green blob, you're going to be disappointed. And I wonder if that might have had an impact as well. I don't think the film is called Green Slime, and the Japanese release it as another title.
The green Slime creates these monsters, it is not.
Them born of the green slime. Yeah.
So again, in this scene of the power plant, the green Slime monster, it resists capture. It starts going nuts, whipping its arms everywhere. It kills some people, It injures some others. It injures Vince, who gets like wounded in the shoulder. Jack ends up shooting it with a laser gun, which doesn't kill it but drives it off I think, down some kind of pit, and then Jack says, Okay, Vince, you've made too many mistakes. I'm in charge now, power
Struggle and let's see. Oh there's a part later where doctor Benson is like, this is the first time anything living has been found in space. Do you understand how important that is. And Jack says, tell that to the wives of the men in the morgue. So Jack is not very interested in scientific discovery. He's just like, you know, how we're gonna how am how am I going to
keep my team alive? But when Jack shot it earlier with the laser weapon, it drops some green blood on the ground, some goo, and doctor Halverson collected a sample of that goo, and he has been doing some analysis, so he calls them to his lab to report. He says, the cells of this creature duplicate faster than anything known to man. He says, in fact, their growth rate is incredible.
It's frightening. And he demonstrates by like running some current through the blood, I think, and that makes it just sort of like bubble and foam and overflow and duplicate. M So, he says, the animal feeds on energy and discharges energy, and as they try to destroy it in the and apparently what happened is as they tried to destroy it in the decontamination chamber, the energy they used to cook it actually fed it and made it larger, and then it could discharge that energy as electricity with
its tentacle. Arms, so it grew larger by feeding off of energy and then eventually by feeding off of the power plant. So you shouldn't use energy weapons to attack it because you can wound it with them, but ultimately those will just make it grow larger and more powerful. Here begins several attacks. There is an attack on doctor
Benson's med bay. She's treating patients there from the first big scuffle with the monster, and then one of the monsters runs into the clinic and starts freaking out, and so the doctors are wheeling bandage patients out while the alien attacks. I did notice in the scene there were some more funny doors on the set, like you can see the two planks kind of wobbling as they slam shut.
And they can't kill the monster, but they do manage to seal it inside the clinic for the moment, and then they discover something else about it, which is that when it bleeds, its blood becomes a seed that spawns whole new monsters. So it's blood doesn't just like grow more, its blood actually becomes one of the new creatures.
So it has this kind of hydra like quality to it.
That's right, And when you shoot it, it so you can shoot it. The blood comes out, that becomes new monsters. That does wound it, but then it can heal itself, essentially by using its tentacle arms to weld its wounds shut. So then Space Command imposes a quarantine. They're like, nothing is leaving this station. If one drop of that blood reaches Earth, it could spell disasters. So y'all are stuck there for now. So Vince and Jack form a plan.
And this is one of those I think things you were referring to when you say the movie is very procedural. It's like they form a plan and they enact that plan to try to trap the monsters.
They want to use a.
Generator in a storage room as bait energy bait, and they're going to turn off all the lights and power and the rest of the station and then use like big flashlights and spotlights to attract the monster to the storage room and trap it there.
It's a pretty good plan. I know, you love a good monster plan, especially a good monster trap plan.
I do love that. And I liked this sequence. Yeah, this is fun. And again it you know, it's it's sort of balanced on the edge. It waffles between campy and funny and then surprisingly hard edged sometimes from moment to moment, but a lot of the sequence does kind of work. It's not just silly fun like, it works pretty good as a creature thriller, agreed, So they set this up. The lead up to the sequence is kind of tense, and then the monster has come creeping down
the hall. They're quacking out their weird screeches, and the plan is working at first, but then oh, they sort of go the wrong way, I think, and end up creeping into the room with all the hospital patients who have been driven out of the clinic, and so they have to lure them back out of there, which Jack does very heroically, self sacrificially with a flashlight, and then they get the monsters back on track with this array of spotlights that are mounted on a cart and they're
like moving it down the hallways to attract them to the trap. There's a bunch of monster chase action here, but eventually they managed to isolate the monsters behind one of the airlocked doors. But there's a problem. Doctor Halverson has become trapped with the monsters in there, and are they going to open the doors to rescue him. Jack says no, going back for him would put everyone at risk. Vince says yes, and they have a standoff where Jack aims a gun at Vince. He's like, better not do it.
Vince says, your move, and he opens the door, only to find Halverson already burned to a crisp. And then the monsters do get back through.
This is a pretty scary scene too, by the way, like it's a nice sort of jump scare.
So here's one where Vince was just wrong. He should have listened to Jack. Jack might not have a heart, but he was right, and now the the threat is revived. Now they end up, I think, trying to close another door to lock them behind, but the monsters are freaking out and wiggling their arms all over the mounted lights on a cart, and they end up wiggling their electric arms over some explosives, and then that's not good at all. There's a big explosion. Part of the space station is
destroyed and monsters get vented out into space. I think some are burned and killed in this explosion. Others end up on the outside of the ship, and then the light from the sun is healing them and making them grow.
I have to admit when The explosion happened with the end of the model. The exterior shot of the model partially exploding. The explosion was so big. For like a long, pregnant second there, I thought the whole station had blown up, and I was like, whoa, this is an abrupt ending to that is a movie.
That is what it looks like.
Yeah, but it is just part of it, or most, just most of the ship blew out. The rest is fine.
That would be a great ending. Actually, if the end just the general and all those people. We couldn't tell a part earlier talking about how Vince should have listened to Jack and he went back to save the scientists. That just got them all killed. All our characters are dead.
Turns out it was just a workplace safety video for space marines.
Right.
So there's another conflict. Jack wants to evacuate the survivors and then have the station completely destroyed so that the monsters will be eliminated. Vince disagrees, he does not want the station destroyed. There's another struggle for power. They start punching each other. I don't even remember how this moment ends. I think Jack sort of gets the upper hand in the end.
I think so yeah, yeah, because again Jack is always ready for people to try and punch him for all of his truth talking.
Then, as they are preparing for evacuation, Vince gets really bitter like doctor Benson comes to talk to him. She's getting her patients ready to get out of there. She tells him to evacuate as well, and he tells doctor Benson, I'm tired of people telling me what to do. Go back to your voice. I know it's never been over between you two hikes. Yeah, that's rough. And then Vince leads a team of Spacewalker commandos to go out of the airlock in suits and blast the slime creatures on
the outside of the station's hull. And there's one scene where we get a classic movie moment where he's like shooting his laser gun and I guess he runs out of laser rounds. I don't know, his battery dies or something, and he throws the ray gun at the aliens through space.
There's some good gun throwing in this movie. There is I think another sequence where someone throws a gun this or is this scene where the gun doesn't just bounce off the monster's head but in beds in the monster's chest.
Yeah.
I'm like, yeah, they get it. They're doing that, they're trained to do that, because it works.
It's like a spear.
Yeah. Yeah.
But here another problem arises. The station needs to be destroyed by being set to burn up in Earth's atmosphere, but autopilot has failed, so they can't just set it and forget it. Jack volunteers to stay behind and sacrifice himself to pilot the station to destruction while everybody else evacuates. And so Vince finds out about this plan, and you know, Lisa tells him, she's like, Jack went back inside alone, and you know what, Vince isn't going to stand for
that one last time. He goes back to save the one man. So it's kind of a yeah, it's kind of a tight theme. It completes the arc. He even this guy he's been having the conflict with the whole time. So he leaves the evacuation shuttle, goes back to fight alongside Jack, but oh no. In doing so, Vince is killed. He gets fatally bear hugged by one of the green slime monsters. By the tentacle arms.
Yeah, which again are not just grotesque arms that crunch, they also shock.
And As the space station is set to burn up on re entry, Jack decides no. To quote robot jocks, he says, we can live. He jumps out of the space station that is going into the atmosphere with Vince's body in tow, and he space walks back to the evacuation ship. Man, he must be a fast moving spacewalker. We get a dramatic final shot of the monsters squealing and throwing their arms all over the place inside the burning space station as it goes down. The model explodes
as it re enters the atmosphere. Jack back on the ship. He's talking to mission control. He says, I recommend the highest citations for Commander Elliott posthumously. So he's recommending decorations for Vince who died coming back to save him. And then says, all right, lieutenant, take her down. And then I'm hilarious mood transition. The Green Slime song comes right back in. Ell Vince is dead. We're gonna have decorations for this heroic warrior Green Slime. Oh man.
Yeah.
I had to check out the ending in the Japanese version to see how it differed. And while there's no group music because again the Japanese cut doesn't have the theme song. The music is still upbeat, and so the energy is not drastically different, I would say, but I agree in either case, it seems like a strange mood transition, like we got to send him home happy, we got to send him home up beat, even if the ending
is really kind of downbeat. I mean, we lost one of our three main characters, and you know, the resolution for the other two characters is not guaranteed. It's still a complex, dramatic situation that they're having to deal with.
But I tripped on a cloud and fell eight miles high, tore my mind. I'm the jagget Skuy.
The lyrics to that song could be about this movie. Those lyrics make just as much sense in context with the Green Slime as anything.
Okay, that's all I got on the Green Slime.
All right, Well, this was a fun one. I enjoyed watching and discussing. The Green Slime. Just reminded everyone out there that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science podcast with core episodes and the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Listener Mail on Mondays, a short form Monster Factor artifact on Wednesdays, and then on Fridays, we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.
If you want to keep up with the movies that we have covered over the years here for Weird House Cinema, you can go to a couple of places. I blog about them at simmutomusic dot com, and also you can go to letterbox dot com. That's L E T E R B O x D dot com. Our username is weird House and you can pull up a nice visual listing of all the movies we've covered over the years.
Huge thanks to our excellent audio producer Jjposway. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact. That's Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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