1968/Directed by Kinji Fukasaku
I’m sure I wasn’t the only monster-loving kid on the verge of puberty who was entranced by the cover art for Famous Monsters of Filmland No. 57, which featured a shapely female astronaut in a skin-tight spacesuit being menaced by a typically lurid, green one-eyed space creature. The art was a detail from Vic Livoti’s original poster for The Green Slime, a 1968 American/Japanese co-production which was one of those films that I never got a chance to see until I recently acquired the widescreen DVD released by Warner Archives.
When a huge meteorite is discovered on a collision course with Earth, a space team mount an operation to land on the object and destroy it with explosives. The mission succeeds, but the team unwittingly bring back a pulsing, luminous green ooze which quickly mutate into an army electricity-shooting tentacled monsters who take over the revloving space station Gamma 3. The obligatory love triangle is provided by Richard Jaeckel, Robert Horton and Italian stunner Luciana Paluzzi (my favorite Bond bad girl) Featuring some elements later found in big studio films like Alien and Armageddon, The Green Slime is a fun slice of swingin’ sixties sci-fi, with mini-skirts and beehives, a colourful pop-art production design, cool monsters that would not have looked out of place stomping across a miniature city in a Toho production, and a classic psychedelic-tinged theme song composed by Charles Fox that was later covered by the Fuzztones!What more could you want?
