Oh, "The Green Slime" is a film I've been searching for high and low on various streamers without much success, until yesterday when I discovered it lurking in the nether regions of Amazon Prime and of course I just had to watch it, parking a second viewing of "Marriage Italian Style" in the process...:)
Was it worth the wait though ?...There's a lot to like in the film but, and I know there are certain people out there who have plenty of time for the Japanese "Tokusatsu" genre (though in reality this is a hybrid Japanese/American/Italian co-production) who will inevitably say I am hard to please but my main gripe with most Tokusatsu is pacing, or the lack thereof - or perhaps more accurately just a different pacing, with the result that most of the time I will fall asleep - this has been an aspect for me since seeing the first "Godzilla" film sometime in the late 90's.
Long dreary scenes of exposition, preamble and pointless-seeming romantic subplots before the action kicks in, and "The Green Slime" is no exception in this, though to be fair these were aspects common to many films of the 50's and 60's, not just Japanese films.
So there was a sense of mild disappointment coupled with the niggle that the original cinemascope format had been squeezed to fit a 16:9 aspect ratio resulting in a vertically elongated image (planets etc not spherical) - that said, the image quality is pretty good and made up for the aspect ratio issue, leaving the general weirdness of the film to be absorbing. I'd known about the film long before the internet thanks to various fanzines and books on science fiction films and stills from the film were intriguing but for some reason it was only available on VHS, DVD or BluRay for a long time, and so of course I jumped on it. The plot involves an orbital space station whose crew spot an asteroid on a collision course with Earth and the mounting of a mission to destroy it that involves landing a futuristic vehicle on its surface to plant nuclear devices, hopefully to smash it to smithereens within a time period of 10 hours. In the course of this mission they discover a green slime that appears to be alive and is brought back to the space station without their knowledge on one of the crew members. Back on board the space station, their mission a success, the green slime multiplies into numerous rubbery cyclops creatures with tentacles that deliver a fatal electric shock to anyone unfortunate to get in the way of them. The crew then have to find a way to defend themselves against this threat while the two male leads, "Commander Jack Rankin" (Robert Horton) and "Commander Vince Elliott" (Richard Jaeckel) squabble over both their love for a female crew member, "Dr. Lisa Benson" (Luciana Paluzzi), and their seniority to each other.
In it's favour, the female character of "Dr Lisa Benson" is depicted as more than the usual damsel-in-distress of many sci-fi films of the era and she is given a more proactive role, however this is slightly overbalanced by the testosterone-fuelled conflicts of the two male leads.
A plus point of the film is the imaginative design of the green slime creatures that obviously benefits from the expertise of Toho Studios in crafting "Kaiju" in numerous Tokusatsu films and unusually required the studio to make multiple "suit-mation" creatures (that appear to be operated by children) rather than the usual one or two giant sized monsters common to most Tokusatsu films. Also on display is the expertise in miniature work and visual effects, though not quite to the standard of the work of Eiji Tsuburaya. As an interesting side note, many of the vehicles featured were the subject of sci-fi themed model kits produced during the 60's in Japan though none of them to my knowledge include any connection to the film. I have a vague recollection of the type of cinema matinee double bills that this film would have been included in, alongside lurid posters and lobby cards - "Flesheaters" (see above) in particular featured some horrific scenes in lobby cards posted outside cinemas that were intended to deter the curiosity of younger viewers.
Despite the film's shortcomings I will always have time for these types of film simply because they often feature left-field plots and concept design with a science-fiction flavour, such as "Terror Beneath The Sea", and other Toho science-fiction potboilers.
In conclusion, "The Green Slime" is an uneven film but worth a look for some interesting ideas and execution and can sit alongside other notably curious Tokusatsu films such as "Latitude Zero", in being co-productions with U.S studios and featuring American actors alongside Japanese cast members, and there's even a funky title and closing song in English in the mix.
"The Green Slime", Dir: Kinji Fukasaku, 1968
Amazon Prime (Pay-per-view)
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