The slime of color

Some months back, TCM ran a day of science fiction films from the late 1960s. I already did a post on Moon Zero Two out of the set, and recently watched a second movie that TCM showed that day: The Green Slime.

Scientists on board a space station called Gamma 3 are sending back a "space weather" report to the United Nations Space Command, whose headquarters are show in a model that looks surprisingly cheesy and made me wonder about the provenance of the movie. More importantly, Commander Elliott (Richard Jaeckel) and his crew spot an asteroid called Flora that has come out of its orbit or something because they determine that on it new path, it's going to strike earth and destroy life on the planet much like the object that killed off the dinosuars 65 million years ago.

The only person who can save Earth is Commander Rankin (Robert Horton). Well, he's going to lead a crew that can save the planet. His job is going to be to go up to Gamma 3, from where he'll lead a mission designed to blow up the asteroid so that the remnants will either barely miss earth or burn up in the atmosphere or something; other movies have since been done on the idea. And with a title like The Green Slime, you might suspect that this is not what the movie is really about as well.

But we'll get to the real plot of the movie in a bit. There's a subplot in that Cmdr. Elliot is in love with Gamma 3's doctor, Lisa Benson (Luciana Paluzzi). However, she was formerly in a relationship with Cmdr. Rankin. That, and the two men constantly clash over whether Rankin thinks is really capable of command. They're going to have to put those differences aside to complete the mission to destroy Flora.

So a ship heads off to Flora to deploy some explosives which should destroy the asteroid, even though it doesn't seem like much in the way of explosives. While on Flora, one of the men finds this weird pulsating green substance that's attached itself to one of the instruments. (Now you know how the film gets its title.) Obviously they're going to have leave those instruments behind, because bringing such a substance back to the station would be extremely dangerous.

Except that they're not able to avoid completely that green slime. Some of it winds up on the station, and it's a form of life unlike anything mankind has seen before. There doesn't seem to be any good way to destroy it, and it also seems to have some odd way of regenerating itself that they're not able to figure out. That, and it's highly dangerous to humans. So the rest of the movie involves the slime being on the station and the humans trying to figure out if there's some way they're going to be able to get rid of it.

The Green Slime, as I implied at the beginning, has a distinctive visual look, even if it's one that looks like it has a very low budget. That, it turns out, is becuase of the international nature of the production. MGM helped finance it, which is why they're at the beginning of the credits in the version TCM ran. However, the idea was conceived by the same Italians behind War of the Planets and the rest of what was known as the "Gamma 1 Quadrilogy". I think I've seen and posted on two of those movies, and they're wildly fun if not terribly good. Furthermore, The Green Slime was filmed in Japan with a largely Japanese behind-the-camera crew.

The results, in terms of an actual polished product, are not particularly great, as the plot is unoriginal and the acting is lousy. But it's stylish and still entertaining if you want an unchallenging scifi/horror film.