The Green Slime (1968)

Here’s what they are: first frothing green spit in a petri dish, then quivering mounds of Jell-O, then pulsating green rocks, and finally, rocketing through any intermediate evolutionary stages, wobbling five-foot-tall cyclopes with waving tentacles for arms that terminate in red crab-claws lit up in Fourth of July sparklers. They eat electricity and, should those sparkler-claws touch you, you’ll be reduced to a scorched mass of human flesh. Luckily – and even though this is the first-ever human contact with an alien lifeform – the crew of the space station Gamma-3 are all outfitted with military helmets and laser guns, as if the eventuality of an alien invasion, or at least a Commie invasion, was at the forefront of the minds at NASA (this is what Newt Gingrich’s moon colony might look like). The guns seem to do precisely nothing, but that doesn’t stop the crew from firing them endlessly at the shambling Green Slimes, eventually leading to a showdown in outer space, as the men soar about in rocket packs shooting their beams at the creatures which are now fumbling about to no apparent purpose on the outer hull of the station.

American actors trade screen time with colorful (and always unconvincing) miniatures, typical of Japanese science fiction films of the era.

This collaboration between the U.S. and Japan was one of the more promising ventures of the Cold War; here it’s quite evident that the two former enemies could agree on one mutual love: silly monster movies. More so than the American cut/hack-job of Godzilla (1954), there’s something heartening about the pop-culture handshake between the two countries with The Green Slime (1968): it’s such a naïve, hopelessly outdated, woefully unhip piece of filmmaking that the fact that it exists at all should be reassuring. Iran might rattle their sabers at us today, but perhaps a few years from now we’ll be making The Green Slime 2 together; surely even Ahmadinejad would love to see a big-budget, CGI-led sequel. (Of course, this is only one of many American/Japanese cinematic collaborations in the decades following Hiroshima; plenty of oddities sprang forth postwar, including Sam Fuller’s very strange and kinda-great House of Bamboo.) But The Green Slime has a very unique pedigree all around. The screenplay is by journeyman writers: Tom Rowe (The Aristocats) and Charles Sinclair and William Finger (Track of the Moon Beast), working from an idea by Ivan Reiner, who was behind the equally nutty B-movies Wild, Wild Planet (1965), The War of the Planets (1966), and The Snow Devils (1967). The cast includes TV actor Robert Horton (A Man Called Shenandoah), Richard Jaeckel (The Dirty Dozen), and the sultry Italian actress Luciana Paluzzi (Thunderball‘s femme fatale). The film was shot in Japan at Toei Studios, with a Japanese director, Kinji Fukasaku, who had been making films since 1961, and in the decades following made his mark in a variety of genres, though the late director is now best known for his last film, the cult classic Battle Royale (2000). The special effects were by Akira Watanabe (Destroy All Monsters). The film begins with a pseudo-psych rock theme song by composer Charles Fox (Love, American Style). The lyrics are as follows:

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 ‘cross your mind
Green sliiiiiime!

What can it be, what is the reason?
Is this the end to all that breathes, and
Is it just something in your head?
Will you believe it when you’re dead?
Green sliiiiiime! Green sliiiiiime! Green sliiiiiiiiiime!

A love triangle, trimmed from the Japanese version, centers around space station commander Jack Rankin (Robert Horton), Vince Elliott (Richard Jaeckel), and Dr. Lisa Benson (Luciana Paluzzi).

The theme song abruptly ends after about forty-five seconds; the film move quickly on, as if expressing post-coital guilt. A futuristic Earth (i.e., a world covered in brightly-colored miniatures that never look like anything except little plastic toys) confronts a giant, threatening asteroid Armageddon-style: by sending out a unit to land on it and blow it to smithereens. Commander Jack Rankin (Horton) rockets out to meet space station Gamma-3, bringing with him some emotional baggage, since his ex-lover is the head of the station’s medical staff, Dr. Lisa Jansen (Paluzzi, who, despite her character’s surname, retains her thick Italian accent); but Jansen is now engaged to Vince Elliott (Jaeckel), commander of Gamma-3. The two men lock horns almost immediately, though given that they’re both the kind of bland, middle-aged louts that frequently starred in these kinds of movies from the 50’s through the 70’s, it’s a mystery what she sees in either of them. The asteroid is detonated rather efficiently, but not before a sequence in which Rankin’s team explores its orange, rocky surface, wading through shallow, ruddy pools infested with globs of a green substance. When the science officer, Halvorsen (Ted Gunther), demonstrates his find – that the substance appears to be alive, and therefore the first alien life ever discovered by mankind – Rankin angrily smashes the jar containing the entity and screams, as though the curious scientist were a five-year-old, “YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU!”

A crew from the Gamma-3 explores the asteroid that's hurtling toward Earth.

But they do take a little bit with them, for some of the substance has adhered to an explorer’s spacesuit. After the asteroid has been detonated in an explosion that can only be described as adorable, the crew settles in for some R&R on the Gamma-3. This involves some futuristic space dancing. See if you can watch this brief dialogue scene without openly gaping at the middle-aged men clumsily dancing with beautiful young fashion models in the background:

Meanwhile, the little bit of slime begins growing and multiplying. Soon enough it forms an ambulatory creature, which kills a crew member before Rankin, Elliott, and Halvorsen discover it feeding off electricity in the “main power room,” and writhing about on the ground in some kind of xenomorphic pleasure that, frankly, made me a little uncomfortable. Rankin points his giant rifle at the creature, but Halvorson pleads once more; could we at least attempt to capture a living specimen of this major scientific discovery, Commander Kill-Everything? Elliott, being leader of the Gamma-3, overrides Rankin’s orders, and some crew members run off to get “a gas gun and a net.” Although that sounds like a foolproof plan, it unfolds badly.

What follows is a solid hour of shooting lasers at the multiplying, one-eyed Green Slimes, each of them flailing their tentacles, eloctrocuting crew members randomly, and making a shrieking noise that somewhat approximates the voice of the Chicken Lady from Kids in the Hall. As it becomes increasingly clear that control of the space station is slipping inexorably into the hands (or, rather, sparklers) of the alien menace, and it’s a plague that can’t be allowed to reach the Earth, Rankin decides he’ll need to detonate the Gamma-3 and escape with the survivors in a rocket. But first, some chaos involving more laser battles and the noble self-sacrifice of Commander Elliott, over whom Dr. Jensen sheds a brief tear before inevitably surrendering herself to the elusive charms of Rankin. The Green Slime is such a strange product of its time that it’s utterly endearing. The stale script seems to have been drafted several years too late – with leftover clichés from 50’s B-movies. Apart from Paluzzi, who is always enjoyable to watch, the casting is uninspired. The juxtaposition of a (mostly) American cast with vintage 60’s Japanese effects work, including those perpetually distracting miniatures, is both jarring and delightful. (At one point, half of the space station spontaneously explodes, which is represented by showing the Gamma-3 – clearly a model hanging on a string – set on fire. Fire is difficult to film convincingly at this scale, and the resulting image is ludicrous.) The crew members wear uniforms that resemble the Lego Spacemen that I used to play with as a child, which is appropriate, since some of the miniatures look like they were constructed out of Legos. Pair it with Moon Zero Two (1969) for a double feature of deliriously out-of-touch late 60’s SF. Both are available on DVD from the Warner Archive; I can attest that The Green Slime looks spectacular, every bit the colorful kitsch that it always was.

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Hammer Films in the News

It’s a big week for Hammer Films, since the recently-resuscitated brand will be releasing a new film, The Woman in Black, on Friday. Starring Daniel Radcliffe, it’s the first Gothic horror to come from the studio since the 70’s. (To date, the new Hammer films have been a mixed bag. The Resident, starring Hilary Swank, was a disappointment. Wake Wood was intriguing, if not entirely successful. Let Me In was superb.) I’m hesitant but hopeful about their latest. The New York Times has a piece about Hammer’s comeback here.

The film is being released just after Hammer announced they will be releasing Blu-Ray special editions of their classic films, including Dracula (1958), The Mummy (1959), The Plague of the Zombies (1966), Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966), The Reptile (1966), Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), Slave Girls (1967), The Vengeance of She (1968), The Lost Continent (1968), Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (1974), and many more not yet announced. Recently an intrepid Hammer buff in Japan tracked down an uncut version of Dracula in a Japanese film archive (with a more graphic death scene for Christopher Lee at the film’s finale); this will be included on the restored edition of Dracula, and Hammer is encouraging fans to contribute any other rare materials they might have. More information here.

Hammer fans should also take note that the just-published art book Naughty and Nice: The Good Girl Art of Bruce Timm, a collection by the artist best known for his retro character design for Batman: The Animated Series, features many pages of Hammer-themed artwork, including the Vampire Lovers-inspired cover he produced for Little Shoppe of Horrors magazine, plus eye-popping work inspired by The Curse of Frankenstein, Lust for a Vampire, and more.

Finally, here’s my own Hammer-themed iPhone case. I designed it using the website CaseMate. Head over and make your own, and they’ll ship the finished product within a week or two.

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Alien (1979)

Here is how I first become conscious of Alien (1979). I was very young – no idea how young, but too young – and my family had innocuously left “Entertainment Tonight” on the television. This was back when ET covered movies, incidentally, and not just celebrity plastic surgery, sex scandals, and drug overdoses. A retrospective on Alien included an extended look at the notorious dinner scene in the film. John Hurt begins choking violently. Yaphet Kotto says, “Come on, the food’s not that bad.” Hurt starts convulsing, and his fellow Nostromo crew members push him onto the table, where he suddenly spasms so brutally that a bloody appendage erupts from his chest. Everyone just stops, stares. The infant alien creature, jutting from the cavity, blindly and slowly turns. Then it dashes off down the table and disappears, leaving John Hurt’s blood-spattered corpse behind. My eyes were several inches from my head.

Concept art for the derelict craft by Moebius.

Memories are deceptive; ET may have edited the scene for broadcast, but I’m certain that was my first exposure to the film, because it marked me. It also spoiled me somewhat when I did finally watch it all the way through, many years later, though by that point I was pretty much aware of the entire plot of the film anyway. Alien is so embedded into pop culture that it’s impossible to avoid. (And the franchise continues to terrorize and fascinate youngsters. I continued the cycle of abuse when I was in high school, babysitting the neighbor boy, who was in elementary school. Aliens was on television. I’d seen it many times already, and figuring that we’d only watch the first forty-five minutes or so before he had to go to bed – and it doesn’t really get scary until later on, right? – then no harm would be done. Just before bedtime, Sigourney Weaver’s entire military unit was slaughtered. Time for bed. I learned the next day that his parents found him wandering the hallways that night, afraid to go to sleep, hunting for “aliens with acid for blood.” That was specific enough to get me into trouble.) Like so many teenage geeks, I obsessed over the Alien franchise, as well as Predator (1987), John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), etc. These R-rated science fiction/horror films were especially potent for me because I grew up on the softer stuff: the Lucas, Spielberg, and Dante films of the early 80’s. The subgenre which Ridley Scott helped launch was gritty, scary, and almost nauseatingly gory, so naturally it had a kind of punk appeal to a teenager, even if I expressed that by buying Aliens vs. Predator comic books and making comics of my own to hand out to classmates. Eventually my passion ebbed. Maybe it was the disappointing Alien³ (1992) that killed the love; or the fact that I was starting to get into “serious” films like those of Scorsese, Coppola, and Kurosawa. (As important as Alien was for me, a few years later Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, The Seven Samurai, and High and Low had opened a whole new world of cinema that I was anxious to explore.)

An excerpt from Walter Simonson's and Archie Goodwin's graphic novel adaptation of "Alien" was included in the May 1979 issue of Heavy Metal magazine.

But I still return to Alien, much more so than its immediate sequel, whose marines vs. monsters model has been endlessly imitated; to me, Scott’s film seems to be the more timeless. (Stylistically speaking, the true sequel to Alien is Blade Runner.) Watching it again, I realize that there is little which visually dates the film – surprisingly so for 1979. Only in the small chamber where Tom Skerritt and Sigourney Weaver consult their ship’s computer, “Mother,” does the film show its age: a computer here is nothing but a keyboard, an MS-DOS style interface, and panels upon panels of pointlessly blinking lights. (But it can still interpret the phrase “WHAT’S THE STORY MOTHER?” – a sentence which would probably send a vexed Siri to Google “Story Mothers.”) By continually redressing the long stretches of Nostromo corridors constructed on set, Scott convincingly creates the feeling of a claustrophobic and labyrinthine spaceship. Every nook and cranny is decorated with evidence of a long occupation in space; essentially it resembles the interior of a deep-sea oil rig, which is more or less what the Nostromo is. Note, for example, the scene in which Ian Holm attacks Sigourney Weaver in some crew member’s cabin: topless pin-ups decorate the wall, a detail easy to miss given that the focus of the action is elsewhere; and an odd little toy dangles from the ceiling (batted out of the way during the struggle), perhaps in memory of a child whose black-and-white photo is briefly glimpsed on the opposite wall. Scott’s attention to detail is thorough, which is helpful given that the story, by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, is intended to be as simple and straightforward as possible – a grisly antidote to the Star Wars frenzy, it would be the equivalent of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in space, with an obvious debt to forefathers The Thing from Another World (1951), It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958), and Planet of the Vampires (1965).

The HR Giger Museum Bar in Switzerland resembles the artist's designs for "Alien."

In some ways the film belongs as much to surrealist artist H.R. Giger as it does to Scott. His designs for the alien’s life-cycle never cease to be fascinating; it’s clear that one of the goals of the film was to provide a genuinely alien creature, something which developed in an environment unlike Earth. (One of the strengths of James Cameron’s sequel is that he accepted that the alien’s life-cycle should provide the story’s central thrust: an Alien film should be a mystery constructed around biology.) It’s difficult to recreate that engrossing first viewing, when you don’t know what the crew is dealing with, or what the creature will transform into next. A highlight of the film is the discovery that the “facehugger” alien has acid for blood, and the race from one deck to the next as the crew helplessly watches as the blood eats straight through the ship. One particular stage of the creature’s biology was omitted from the final print of the film, though it was reinstated for the 2003 alternate cut: late in the story, Weaver’s Ripley discovers that the creature is cocooning its victims like a spider (the Alan Dean Foster novelization retained this version of events). All of these strange details are really the meat of the story; it helps distract from the film’s clichéd elements, such as the perpetually unhelpful cat Jones, springing out of dark corners and generally acting as a false alarm. No, it’s the world you care about, as thoughtfully constructed as anything in Star Wars – Scott and Giger create a believable space for the viewer to inhabit, which adds to the terror. The set constructed for the “space jockey” – the bridge of a massive alien ship, whose throne is occupied by a fossilized creature that has grown into the seat, a tell-tale cavity in its chest – is faithfully close to Giger’s colorless, biomechanical illustrations, and thus has the authentic feel of a waking nightmare. When Veronica Cartwright suggests they leave immediately, she’s the audience surrogate; on this viewing I found myself wondering: if this is truly alien, how do they even know this is a ship? Couldn’t this be like that Philip K. Dick short story where the astronauts step into what they think is a ship, but turns out to be a creature’s mouth? Giger and Scott further prey upon the viewer’s subconscious by making the alien and its methods queasily sexual. The reproductive cycle is perverted by its birth straight through Hurt’s chest. The alien itself is phallic (particularly in its “chestburster” state), grotesquely so, and its assault on Cartwright has the uncomfortable overtone of rape. A true horror film, Alien may tease monster movie conventions, but is focused upon genuinely upsetting the viewer.

Screenshot of the Atari 2600 Alien videogame.

Nonetheless, it tapped into something so potent with audiences that it became an Exorcist-style phenomenon. Over the following decades it would inspire sequels, comic books, video games, and parodies (from Mad Magazine to Spaceballs). As with Psycho (1960), its innovations – from the chestburster sequence to the fact that O’Bannon kills off the ship’s captain (Skerritt), the presumed hero of the film, well before its end – have become so familiar as to have lost some of their impact. But it’s still a potent film, one so intelligently crafted that you lose yourself in its world on each viewing. Since it’s classified as a “special effects blockbuster,” it’s easy to forget the authentic performances delivered by the cast; none of them are burdened with clumsy exposition. They have a shared history which exhibits itself in minor rivalries and resentment that largely go unspoken, but are quite clear. Small character details – Skerritt relaxing to classical music, Cartwright’s nervous chain-smoking – speak volumes; I continue to wonder if Skerritt’s Captain Dallas had a short-lived affair with Ripley, for there’s a strange mixture of shared confidence and bitterness between the two of them. You don’t get these subtle textures in your average science fiction film, and certainly not in the rip-offs which followed. One hopes that some of this will be captured in the upcoming Prometheus, Scott’s revisit to the Alien universe, but failing that, history has already proven that nothing can diminish the original.

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