'THE GREEN SLIME'....WE'RE TURNING JAPANESE...WE REALLY THINK SO.

The Green Slime (1968) forever holds its one-of-a-kind status in the long history of astoundingly awful science fiction movies.......the only film (as far as we know) with an entirely Caucasian cast in front of the camera and an entirely Japanese crew and director behind it......

            Ooops....not quite.....a bunch of Japanese children do appear on camera....incognito, you might say. We'll get to them in a minute....

             Released by MGM and produced in Tokyo by the Toei company, the movie was sort of descended from a series of equally ludicrous science fiction adventures that MGM produced in Italy with dubbed-in-English Italian casts....(mostly stiffs and babes from the defunct sword-and-sandal Hercules genre, trading in their togas and leather diapers for form fitting intergalactic jump suits...)

             Why MGM decided to move this madness over to Japan, we'll never know....(a good guess: cheaper production, even though the Italian space operas already looked like they were made for the price of a large pepperoni pizzas..)  But the BQ is eternally grateful for the move.....since it resulted in the guiltiest of our guilty pleasures....."The Green Slime"....

             The Slime splattered on to U.S. theater screens in the summer of 1969, one year after Kubrick's '2001'  stunned the world with its groundbreaking visuals. So have you have to admire the sheer nerve of MGM, who financed and distributed '2001' for next unleashing "The Green Slime", which featured space ships and a space station that looked assembled from model kits off the toy department shelves at Woolworth's.

              In the future envisioned here, our space program staff (played entirely by white guys 'n gals, recruited from U.S. military bases in Japan) face a daunting crisis.....an asteroid hurtling toward Earth on a collision course...(Holy Armageddon.....this sounds familiar....)  A mission is quickly dispatched from Space Station Gamma 3 (a large, rotating, plastic Dunkin Donut) to plant a nuke on that pesky rock and blow it into sushi. All goes well.....but crew members return with green goo on their space jammies.....

              When the goo-stained duds get microwaved for decontamination, the goo promptly bakes, like Pillsbury cookies  into hordes of green, scaly rubber-suited, squeaking monsters. They fry unlucky crew members with their flailing electrocuting tentacles, each creature blinking madly with its single red eye. (Sounds like a fun party to us... and this is where the Japanese kiddies come in, inhabiting the Green Slime Halloween Adventure Shop costumes ) Our square-jawed heroes (Robert Horton, Richard Jaeckel) do brave battle with the Slime whenever they're not fighting over the hot Gamma 3 medico they're both in love with (Luciana Paluzzi)

              Things don't go well for our Space Studs though.....laser-blasting the slime only causes them to drip more goo, which turns into even more rubber squeakers. But don't worry, action fans...pretty soon everyone forgets that danger and lasers Slime with wild abandon....until their guns run out of juice and they resort to that time-honored tradition, simply throwing your gun at whatever you shot at......

            All this delirious insanity speeds along under the direction of the prolific Kinji Fukasaku, who would shortly go on to replace Akira Kurosawa as the director of the Japanese sequences of "Tora! Tora! Tora!"  (and much later celebrated as the evil genius behind the banned-in-500-countries "Battle Royale")  According to dubious legend, Fukasaku supposedly intended "The Green Slime" as a parable of Vietnam.......and you'd have to be heavily drinking the movie's green goo to extract that concept out of the jumble of  tentacles, laser beams and flaming space stations.  Watching it decades later.....you might detect a slight glimmer of what Fukasaku was going for.....in its spitball spectacle of a technologically superior American force overwhelmed and overcome by a relentless onslaught of far more primitive entities. (If you took this to its logical end.....whatever's left of the Slime's asteroid would end up as picturesque tourist destination....)

            We prefer to keep politics out of "The Green Slime" and enjoy it for all its simple, brazenly idiotic pleasures. And that includes MGM grafting on an immortal, lunatic, faux-psychadelic title song. An unknown singer screams out, "Is it something in your head? Will you believe it when you're dead? Green Sliimmmmme!"  The BQ forever believes.....3 slimy stars.(***)