704-The Incredible Melting Man

Film Year:  1977
Genre:  Horror, Science Fiction
Director:  William Sachs
Starring:  Alex Rebar, Burr DeBenning, Myron Healey
MST Season:  7

The Movie

Talent titans of the silver screen united!  Academy Award winning make-up artist Rick Baker (An American Werewolf in London, The Wolfman) teams up with Academy Award winning director Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs)…in a supporting acting role.

This powerful epic is a story tells of astronaut Steve West’s journey to the planet Saturn, but a solar flare caused his body to be irradiated.  Thanks to a spectacularly bad jump cut (which may have been due to lack of time or lack of budget), Steve is transported back to Earth in a blink of an eye from Saturn (thank you for your assistance, Captain Kirk and Scotty).  Once back on his own planet, Steve discovers his skin being turned into a gelatinous ooze, escapes from custody, and becomes homicidal because that’s what you do if you’re disfigured (just ask Harvey Two-Face).  It’s up to one intrepid Dr. Ted Nelson to find him before it’s too late.

Ooey-gooey-rich-and-chewy monster movie is mostly paint by numbers and tries to sell itself through its high-concept premise alone.  One can’t say that you don’t get what you’re promised when you go see a movie called The Incredible Melting Man.  Unfortunately it’s offset by uneven plotting, poor acting, and questionable jarring tonal shifts (the elderly couple being a nifty example).  The movie is often unintentionally funny, with the scene featuring a nurse slow-mo crashing through a glass door taking top honors on that regard.  But it will have you laughing one minute and boring you the next and grossing you out in between.

Be forewarned that this flick lives up to its title, and is quite a bit gorier than we’re used to seeing on MST (which uses edited versions of their films for television broadcast).  In the case of Incredible Melting Man, if you cut out all of the gooey content you’d be stuck with about forty minutes of fakey outer space, old people stealing lemons, magical milk levitating cats, and Ted Nelson wandering around searching for a seemingly invisible monster and complaining about a lack of crackers.  I, myself, can’t complain about that.  This movie is full of crackers.

But speaking of crackers, this probably isn’t the best episode to be eating anything while watching.  So you might want to set aside that pizza and popcorn, maybe keep a jug of water handy to help keep that bile down.

The Episode

You see before the seventh season was put into production our crew at MST made a movie.  A real Hollywood movie.  Not a real successful Hollywood movie, but it was a studio motion picture.  This episode takes their experiences from that and puts them forth in a satirical manor.  Watching them you’d almost think they had some sort of resentment for the experience.  Being micromanaged in Hollywood?  NAAAAAAH that would never happen.

(Pssst…they do and it did)

While the movie segments don’t slouch, the real stars of the episode are the host segments.  It’s a fairly wonderful story arc, as Dr. Forrester and Pearl inform Crow that Hollywood has picked up his screenplay Earth vs. Soup (first featured in Earth vs. the Spider).  What results is a wild and wacky hodgepodge of production woes:  from budget problems to disastrous reads to test screenings, and, my personal favorite, Mike wearing a Kevin Bacon name tag.  Say what you will about Mystery Science Theater 3000:  The Movie, but the affair sent us home with some wonderful material here.

It’s not often that the movie segments play-second fiddle in an episode, and it might usually be because they’re a bit below par to the point that the host segments shine brighter.  It’s not really the case here, as they’re given one hell of a weird movie, and a more extravagant one than they’re used to.  Some of their wit feels fresher because the film is so unique in their canon.  The riffing is at its strongest when the movie is at its oddest, which is more toward the beginning, and Mike, Servo, and Crow set forth the precision jabs like the pros they are.  As the film’s tone gets darker, the laughter becomes less uproarious and more like a steady stream of chuckles, which is the sad disappointment of this episode.  Had the laughs kept pace with the first third of the movie, then we would have had a classic on our hands.  But they die down and we’re left with just a solid performer instead.

Good

The DVD

This episodead was released in Shout Factory's Volume XXXVI.  Unfortunately the picture and audio were good, so we could see all the melting in its full splendor.

The special features on this disc are recycled from Shout's blu-ray release of the uncut film, but luckily they're pretty good.  The first is a very brief three-minute interview with make-up artist Greg Cannom.  Melting Man was his first film, and he seems to have some solid nostalgia for it.

I'm not quite sure why his interview wasn't edited into the second feature, which is a pair of interviews with director William Sachs and make-up artist Rick Baker edited together, but whatever.  Sachs, while unhappy with the film as a whole, argues the film's comic-book and classic horror style merits, though never quite sells them as he tends to repeat himself.  Baker on the other hand is very open about the silly movie, claims he only made it because they met his price, and is overall down on his work as a whole (though he probably shouldn't be.

Concluding the disc is a pair of trailers for the film.