The Green Slime (1968)

Well, this has been sort of a holy grail in recent years. I remember seeing this movie in the Leslie Junior High School auditorium sometime in the early '70s. It was on a weekend, and I'm not sure if I was attending Leslie yet (which would put it after '72) or if I was still in elementary school, which would put it between '70, when we returned from Yap, and '72. I didn't remember a thing about it, except that it creeped me out. (I've always been a weenie when it comes to horror films.) I also remember that lots of the kids thought this one was pretty funny, in a cheesy way, and that's certainly the reputation the film has. (See Glenn Erickson's review for a representative bashing.) Still, Craig Smith and I have often talked about how much fun it would be to see this again as an adult.

In the meantime I had also discovered that director Kinji Fukasaku was a pretty interesting genre film-maker, so I was curious if the movie might be better than its reputation. Now having seen it again, courtesy of Warner Archive's remastered release on DVD-R, I'm not prepared to go that far, although I do think it's much more interesting visually than Erickson allows. There's certainly plenty of cheese, starting with the theme song. It's also definitely a kids film that can't really escape the simple concepts, let alone the cheap, goofy design of the rampaging alien monsters. The story is one cliche after another, borrowing from every movie that preceded it, from Forbidden Planet (1956) to The Blob (1958) (or Toho's The H-Man (1958) to Wild, Wild Planet (1965). (One thing I hadn't realized is that it was produced by the same guy who produced Antonio Margheriti's Italian sci-fi cheesefests.) How Fukasaku and Toei got involved, I'm not sure. This was shot at Toei Studios in Japan, yet all the main actors are American. An early international production, I guess.

Well, I still found this a lot of fun, despite the cheesiness. It doesn't have the atmosphere of Bava's Terrore nello spazio (1965), but by gum it has some of that '60s sense of color, not all of it green.











( Some of it is blue )

Progress report

It isn't all drunken debauchery around here, you know. For the past couple of months I've been working on a travelogue/trip report about my travels in November 2010. I've written close to 13,000 words at this point, and I'm just to the point of leaving Britain. This is already the longest thing I've written since Travels with the Wild Child, which was just over 30,000 words. Of course there's no certainty yet that I'll finish this or that I'll publish it if I do. We'll see how it turns out, if it turns out.

I'm also continuing to work on setting up a blog to use as a repository for my film and early science fiction reviews. I've been reading a WordPress book that holyoutlaw let me borrow, and this weekend I've been trying to settle on a theme (as the visual scheme is called in WordPress). Any comments or suggestions would be welcome. There are some other WordPress features that I want to understand before I start posting. Still, it feels like I'm getting closer.

And now that I've bragged about how productive I've been, I think I'll goof off for the rest of the day. Work has been kind of stressful lately, since I've been delving into a piece of software that I don't understand very well, but last week I made headway on that front too. Progress!