108-The Slime People

Film Year:  1963
Genre:  Horror
Director:  Robert Hutton
Starring:  Robert Hutton, Lea Tremayne, Robert Burton, Susan Hart, Judee Norton
MST Season:  1
Featured Short:  "Radar Men from the Moon:  Chapter Six - Hills of Death"

The Short

Jumping out of their cars before the fake-out quick cut, we are flung into this week’s single serving of Commando Cody.  This one features Cody’s pal Ted being kidnapped and escaping, anticlimactic padding this may be, it sends Cody pursuing the bad guys and getting into a gunfight.

I feel as if I’ve said my peace on Commando Cody many times over by now.  Serials are tiresome even when they’re spaced far apart like this.  When this chapter ends, I feel a bit irritated because nothing really happened.  And what’s worse is that I’m wise to it, because a serial is nothing more than thirty minutes of story padded out to twelve or fifteen chapters that last fifteen minutes each.  Now that we’re halfway through Commando Cody we’re getting to the most tedious chapters of the bunch, and they can get infuriating.

The Movie

This 60’s cheapie was a labor of love for film’s star/director Robert Hutton, who filmed independently and even trudged on when he had no money to complete it.  But the persistence of the filmmaking doesn’t put energy into this tale of underground reptilian monsters who invade the surface and conquer Los Angeles (like anyone gives a damn), covering it in everlasting fog, and killing every human they come across (good riddance, Hollywood).  A group of almost offensively stupid survivors to mount a retaliation against these creatures and save humanity.  We’re doomed.

The movie almost seems like a prototype for John Carpenter’s The Fog or Stephen King’s The Mist in its attempt to create mood through fog, as well as creating a feasible lack of vision for characters so creatures could sneak up on them.  Elements are also similar to George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, as it features isolated characters with limited knowledge of what exactly is going on, with minimal context being brought by news broadcast.  Unfortunately that’s about all the film has going for it.

The film is a fun idea for a monster movie, reeking of amateur status.  Take note of several scenes featuring our characters in a car, which has several characters bouncing around to create some sort of half-assed “illusion” that the car is swerving like crazy.  The effect just looks like what it is, a bunch of people rolling around in their seats.  Even when it comes to the film’s idea of mood by use of fog, the film overdoes it and rolls the fog so thick it’s hard to see what’s happening.  It’s easy to think that the fog is ramped up to hide something wrong with any particular scene, but if it is that’s one of the smartest things about this movie.

It’s certainly a frustrating movie due to wasted potential, which walks hand-in-hand with its next-to-nothing production values.  It’s certainly a movie where I like the concept and sit down to have a cheesy good time with, but really don’t get much of anything from the experience.

The Episode

The Slime People gives the crew material to work with, however it’s so leisurely paced that it comes few and far between.  There are some good laughs to be had whenever there’s momentum in the story, the news reports at the beginning for example is fairly funny.  But the film finds characters stopping in their tracks and waiting things out quite often and there is not a lot that can be done.  There is a bit of a disappointment that the crew doesn’t take advantage of certain opens the film gives them, such as the afore mentioned car footage.  They do take note of the fact that the car they’re in isn’t driving anywhere, but that’s seems like the smallest observation they could make.

Helping the watchability of this particular episode is further experimentation to keep the theater seats from blending in with the movie, where they tint the film blue to keep them separated.  While the blue coloring is a bit of an eyesore as well, it seems like it’s the least of all the evils they’ve tried so far.  This film pigmentation would last for all black and white movies until late in season three, where the black and white movies start to look a more natural grey shade instead of blue.

As for Commando Cody…it’s a Commando Cody.  There are a lot of gags we’ve heard before, and a lot of lesser gags that we haven’t.  We’re further cementing that Commando Cody was far too ambitious a project for this early in MST’s run.  The monotonous stories and similar footage are really causing our boys to struggle.

Host segments largely nitpick the plausibility of what they’re watching this week, starting by putting Commando Cody on trial and following up with two segments questioning the story of the movie.  I particularly like the third host segment, which has the bots playing with a fog machine, making the Satellite of Love as un-seeable as the film itself.  The second segment even plays with self awareness, where Servo comes up with an idea about some guy stranded on a desert island and forced to watch bad sitcoms, while Joel says it would never fly.

Poopie!:  Joel misidentifies Servo as Crow in the intro.

The Slime People makes for a dreary watch, and Joel and the bots have proven with some of the earlier episodes that they can still elevate films like this even this early in the run, as I’m a fan of episodes like Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy and Mad Monster.  I might have an against the grain opinion when it comes to first season episodes when I feel like some of those early ugly print film riffs are a bit funnier than later, and cleaner, efforts like Slime People.  If you find yourself disagreeing with me on those, this episode might be a bit more worthwhile.  For me I find that they stumble a bit with the tedium on this particular movie, and with an equally tedious Commando Cody short attached to the episode this one just doesn’t gel as well as it could.

Average

The DVD

Shout Factory released The Slime People on their Volume XXVII set, featuring great video and audio.    Featured is an interview with Judith (Morton) Fraser, who recalls how she and her friend Susan Hart were cast in the film, as well as recollections of the rest of the cast and crew and disappointment in the film itself.  There is a theatrical trailer as well.

The Commando Cody short was featured on a compilation disc of Commando Cody shorts released online with Volume XXV.