I have a confession to make. In the unlikely event I’m put in a time
machine, sent back to the late spring/early summer of 1969 and given a free
pass to only one of two films presently showing at the local twinplex – the
choices being Stanley Kubricks’s 2001: a
Space Odyssey or Kinji Fukasaku’s The
Green Slime… Well, I admit with some degree of shame and embarrassment that
I would choose The Green Slime. I do not doubt for a moment the superiority,
intellectualism or visual majesty of the former over the latter. But I was eight and a half years old in the
summer of 1969 when my parents took me to 2001:
A Space Odyssey and I confess I was pretty much bored to tears. Arthur Clarke’s scenario was too obtuse for
my grade-school comprehension; the pacing of the film was funeral, the opening
bit with the apes and the obelisk bewildering. The outer space stuff, I admit, was pretty cool.
In any case, it was The
Green Slime and not 2001 that was
the talk of the school back in 1969. It
must be said that MGM marketed the film pretty aggressively. The campaign book for The Green Slime suggested theater-owners invest in the ballyhoo package
they had masterfully assembled, an over-the-top promotional “Go-Get ‘em Fright
Kit.†These kits included “1000 Galling Green Bumper Stickers, 2 Eye Catching,
Teeth-Gnashing Stencils, 2000 Greasy, Goggling, High-Camp Pop-Art Buttons in
Basic Gripping Green, and 250 Ghastly, Ghoulish, Gelatinous Green Slimes in Guaranteed to Nauseate
the Nefarious.†MGM also issued a 45rpm
record of the gnarly rock and roll song celebrating The Green Slime, causing all - of a certain age, at least - to
twist the volume knob to high on our AM radios.
In June of 1969, every American kid was already talking
about outer space. Though shot in 1968
at Toei Studios, Tokyo, Japan, The Green
Slime opened mid-week near my home just across the Hudson River from
Manhattan, on May 21, 1969. In less than
two month’s time, two of the three astronauts on NASA’s Apollo 11 mission would
walk on the surface of the moon for the first time in recorded history. The promotional department at MGM took every
advantage of public interest in the space-craze. Weeks following the film’s initial release - and
a mere month prior to the much anticipated NASA moon walk - the black and white
newspaper slicks for The Green Slime would
feature a new banner draped across the top of the ad copy: “Lunar Contamination Worries Washington: Will future moon landings expose our
astronauts to strange germs that could grow… AND GROW… into THE GREEN SLIME?â€
In The Green Slime
actor Robert Horton plays Commander Jack Rankin, a neither particularly warm
nor likable character, but a guy with a reputation for getting things
done. He’s brought out of retirement by
an officer at the United Nations Space Command (UNSC) who pleads for his
cooperation in a time-sensitive demolition job. It seems as though there’s a six million ton asteroid, nickname Flora, hurtling directly in a trajectory
toward planet Earth. At its present rate
of speed, the asteroid will collide with the planet in approximately ten hours
time, so it’s pretty imperative that Commander Rankin get to work
immediately.
The crusty astronaut is rocketed to the circular and
tubular Gamma 3 space station where
he and a small team will board yet another spacecraft and shuttle over to the
surface of the asteroid. They intend
blow the asteroid from its current trajectory through the use of a few
relatively small explosives. This
mission is accomplished, pretty handily I might add, but the real trouble starts
to brew when a small specimen of the asteroid’s green slime attaches itself to
the pants leg of one astronaut and is inadvertently transported back to C Block
of Gamma 3. The green slime soon begins to reproduce and
morph from the primordial ooze of its original state to a shuffling, green
fire-hydrant shaped creature with deep-recessed red eyes. Their long and groping tentacles electrocute any
hapless victim who happens to stumble across their whereabouts.
There are also some inter-personal fireworks aboard Gamma 3 when we learn that Rankin and the
ship’s Commander Vince Elliott (Richard Jaeckel) don’t particularly care for
one another. For starters, Elliott is
poised to marry the voluptuous Dr. Lisa Benson (Luciana Paluzzi), a beauty who
walks about the starship in a stylish silver lamè suit and was, apparently, a
jilted paramour of Commander Rankin. It’s difficult to determine why Paluzzi would have – now or at any other
time - any romantic interest in Rankin. While husband-to-be Vince Elliott might have his own testosterone-fueled
problems to work through, he comes off as someone you might enjoy having a beer
with. Conversely, and despite his
sun-tanned skin, chiseled profile, and sculptured brush of spray matted hair, Horton’s
Rankin is positively humorless and uncharismatic. He appears in the personage of a terminally
dour game show host.
The set designs of Shinichi Eno are very futuristic and colorful. In the tradition of so many Japanese sci-fi films of the era, many of the large scale sets are very obvious miniatures posing as the real thing, but not distractingly so. Though the visual effects team of Yukio Manoda and Akira Watanabe were not able to produce the eye-popping imagery of space travel or astronauts in free flight as seen in Kubrick’s 2001, the effects aren’t all that bad either. The scene where a team of astronauts go airborne in jet-packs to do battle with the aliens attempting to feed themselves from the energetic smorgasbord that is Gamma 3’s solar generation station is pretty impressive… better or no worse than, say, of Derek Medding’s work on the more expensive Moonraker made ten years later.
Though definitely a product of the swinging late 1960’s, the film actually has more in common with the popcorn-munching fun of the sci-fi thrillers of the 1950s. The “we’re trapped in a space ship with an alien out to kill us†scenario is lifted from… well, practically every 50’s sci-fi movie, but most notably It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958). The idea of the aliens drawing their energies from pre-existing power-sources is lifted from the more cerebral The Magnetic Monster (1953).
Originally made available on home video on VHS through MGM/UA in 1991 and much later as a made-on-demand DVD as part of the Warner Archive Collection in 2010, this is the first appearance of The Green Slime in the Blu-Ray format and it's most welcome. It is offered here in 1080p High Definition 16 x 9 2.35:1 and with DTS-HD Master Audio. The set features an English language 2.0 mono track and removable English sub-titles though, sadly, there are no additional special features aside from the film’s U.S. trailer.
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