By DAVE DUGGINS

Certain movies you just end up loving for reasons you can hardly explain to other people--particularly when the movie is as wretched as The Green Slime, a joint American-Japanese venture made in 1969 and directed by Kinji Fukasaku (Black Lizard, Mansion of the Black Rose, Tora! Tora! Tora!).

My wife often gives me strange looks when I’m watching these gems I review for Renfield, sitting rapt in front of the idiot box with the most idiotic flicks I am able to get my hands on. "Why do you watch this stuff?" she asks. "What do you get out of it?"

Hey, it’s love. Love often makes no sense whatsoever.

I love movies like The Green Slime because they look like something you could do yourself with a video camera and a couple of friends on a boring afternoon. Summer vacation? Off school, nothing to do? Go out in your backyard and make your own bad movie!

The Green Slime stars Wagon Train veteran Robert Horton as Commander Jack Rankin, who looks every bit the trail-hardened, sun-weathered Western hero he usually plays. His hair is perfect, and it stays that way – even immediately after removing his ridiculous space Army helmet.

His foil is Vince Elliott, played by Richard Jaekel. They argue back and forth about who’s in charge constantly, giving the audience something to watch between monster attacks. If this were a real story, you might call it a subplot ... but this isn’t a real story, so I call it a distraction! Every time they start bashing egos I hit the fast forward button.

Lucianna Paluzzi plays Lisa Benson, the girl our two boys spend most of their time preening for. Lucianna’s pretty in a Raquel Welch sort of way, and has one of those heavy, liquid Sophia Loren-ish accents (she sounds French and her character’s name is Lisa Benson?!!?). Mostly she stands out of the way while her two boyfriends fight monsters in typical B.R. (Before Ripley) horror-movie fashion.

So here’s the deal: there’s a delightfully improbable perfectly spherical asteroid on its way toward Earth ("a collision course!" a generic mission controller says dramatically just before the theme song begins – more on that later). Jack Rankin is selected to head the mission to "blow it out of the sky," as he so eloquently puts it. Commander Vince Eliott’s not too happy about somebody else leading a mission on his space station, but what’s he gonna do? He’s under orders.

They place explosive charges on the asteroid (sound familiar, Armageddon fans?), while hilariously cheesy music – a five year old playing his dad’s electric guitar, maybe? – plays behind. In the process, the bumbling, half-bright Dr. Halverson (a graduate of the Deep Blue Sea Susan McAlester Scientific Studies program) picks up a little green fungus, which manages to survive decontamination when they return to Gamma 3. The asteroid blows up, throwing great clouds of chalky dust and smoke into the "vacuum of space" (read: soundstage).

But now they’ve got a bigger problem: the green slime is loose on the station. It’s big. It’s bad. It’s … green. And it’s rude, man, interrupting their 60’s nightclub jitterbugging by killing somebody. Gross breach of etiquette. Of course, the only reason the nightclub scene is in the movie is so Larkin can dance with Eliott’s girlfriend, making him jealous and stirring up tension. Time to hit the fast forward button again.

The icky stuff wastes no time in dispatching a couple of day-pay extras, burning them to death with electricity, which they feed on and produce for defense in equal measure. So you can’t get close to them, and if you try to shoot them with your big plastic silver ray gun, their blood spawns more of the creatures. This is a bad thing.

What’s a sixties sci-fi movie hero to do? Why … burn ‘em, of course. Burn the whole station! Burn it all!

Burn it they do, but not before an army of slimy monsters kills a whole bunch of people, threatens our heroes, and pretty much trashes everything that isn't nailed down.

And what a fine bunch of monsters they are! Every bit as convincing as your favorite Godzilla flick, flopping their limp tentacles about aimlessly (the tentacles have neat little sparklers on the ends), making little chirpy noises, blinking one huge red eye in the center of their knobby green foreheads, dripping little slimelets as they shuffle around trying not to look like half-blind extras in heavy rubber costumes.

Hell, you could pay me to do that. I’d endure the hot stage lights. What a job! I always thought it would be great to climb into one of the classic Japanese monster suits. "How was your day, dear?" "Oh, fine, honey … I stomped all over Tokyo, laying waste to cardboard buildings. After lunch, I toasted King Ghidorah the three-headed dragon with my radioactive breath!" How could you have a bad day with a job like that?

Although the green slimesuits aren’t nearly so cool as Godzilla or one of his buds (they’re normal human-sized, for one thing), they are still good friendly cheesy fun.

The whole movie looks like a package of pasteurized processed cheese food product, for that matter. I have said it before and I’ll say it again: I love models, and the more they look like models, the more I love ‘em. It’s more of that home-grown ambience, the feeling that you could probably put a set like that together yourself if you had a long weekend to do it. Some of this comes from a childhood liberally dosed with Captain Scarlet and the Thunderbirds. But I digress. This ain’t Child Psychology 211.

The miniature sets in this movie are awe-inspiring in their cheesiness, and the rockets are my absolute favorites in any bad movie ever. They’ve got these cool blowtorch-like flames that come out the back, a bit like Gamera’s guidance rockets (a peculiarly Japanese invention, it seems). When they fly through space, smoke drifts up from the blowtorch engines. Ironically, you can see the smoke that much more clearly against the black star-studded background, reminding you that, in space … no one can hear you break the laws of physics.

The space station itself, Gamma 3, is so obviously a model because it has very little surface detail and there are these huge painted letters on the outside: UNSC GAMMA 3. How did they get those letters so damned big? Must have taken weeks, with at least a squad-sized work detail. That would have been a crap job, all right. Twelve hours a day in an environment suit with a paintbrush … and no overtime. That’s government work for you.

For some reason, the design of the space station is sort of scientifically accurate, with a rotating torus to provide artificial gravity. I found that really funny in light of all the other gross inaccuracies littering the film. Why’d they even bother?

Even better than just cheesy models are models that blow up, and the space station does just that, flaming into the upper atmosphere of Earth in grand final-reel style, taking all those damned evil green slimeys with it. And it doesn’t just burn up. Oh no. It’s like a light bulb hitting a cinderblock wall: one minute it’s there, streaming flames as the special effects guys roll the starfield by behind it, and the next: BOOM! Gone. See ya. Asta la bye-bye.

By the time we get to this point, we’ve seen every cliché the genre has deigned to serve up: if guns don’t work, you throw your helmet at ‘em. When your gun runs out of ammo, you throw the gun at ‘em … and if you’re lucky like Vince Elliott, you spear one of the ugly suckers right through his big red eye with it!

There’s big macho-sounding dialogue, painful acting, a Hero who Sacrifices Himself in an Attempt to Save Others, and enough-army-of-heroes-vs.-the-monsters-in-lasergun-shootouts stuff to put any E.E. "Doc" Smith novel to shame.

Could you call the movie science fiction? Hmmm … maybe. But Renfield and I agree – there are enough monsters and scary-movie cliches in evidence here to plant this seminal clunker squarely in the HORROR-WOOD school of schlock cinema--just where we like it!

Thanks. Dave, for braving the very bottom of the bad B-movie monster barrel to open this jar of slime!  Be sure to wash your hands now...

Article copyright © Dave Duggins.   Visit his website.

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