THE GREEN SLIME Movie Review

Gamma Sango Uchu Daisakusen
Battle Beyond the Stars
Death and the Green Slime

Whatever happened to those innocent days when you could release a picture like The Green Slime that was made for ten bucks and looked it, featured a bunch of one-eyed octopi with rubber tentacles that were being waved by stagehands, and boasted an “international cast” of low-rent performers like Robert (Wagon Train) Horton and Luciana (99 Women) Paluzzi? I suppose we should be glad they're gone, but I'm stubbornly resisting the New World Order as it applies to this kind of trash. For the record, The Green Slime is a Japanese/American co-production about a space station overrun by … green slime. The slime turns into the rubber octopi, and therein lies a tale. An advantage of such films was that you could go on opening night and not worry about advance ticket purchase (as with, say, the new, unimproved Godzilla). And you got more bang for your buck—MGM released The Green Slime on a double bill with Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers, thus bridging the class gap between the art house and what was then the meat-and-potatoes of the 42nd St. grind house. It was a more democratic world. The American version of The Green Slime features a peppy theme song sung by Richard Delvy (“You'll believe it when you're DEAD,” instructively warn the lyrics), and was directed by Kinji Fukasaku, who a decade later would make the energetic Star Wars ripoff Message from Space, in which Vic Morrow finds an extraterrestrial walnut in his scotch. Go ahead—tell me movies are better now. I dare you.

NEXT STOP… It! The Terror from Beyond Space, Alien, Invasion of the Neptune Men

1968 (G) 90m/C JP Robert Horton, Richard Jaeckel, Luciana Paluzzi, Bud Widom, Ted Gunther, Robert Dunham; D: Kinji Fukasaku; W: Ivan Reiner, Charles Sinclair, Bill Finger; C: Yoshikazu Yamasawa; M: Charles Fox, Toshiaki Tsushima. VHS MGM