Hacktober #20 (Scanned In Drips And Drabs)

The 70's was a pretty dire time for the traditional monster movie, replete with shitty giant rabbits, shitty giant spiders attached to Volkswagons and a bunch of other shitty "giant" things, usually portrayed by superimposing ants over backgrounds or dumping rats into miniature sets (and drowning them, holy shit, Food of the Gods, WTF?). Attempts at creating a modern horror icon usually dipped into 50's SF-horror territory, with dullsville junk like Slithis and the The Incredible Melting Man. Both were honest if lousy attempts, but whereas no one really remembers Slithis or Laserblast or The Crater Lake Monster (a real throwback, as the Crater critter was stop-motion animated) -- most goofballs my age and quite a few younger goofballs have heard of The Incredible Melting Man. And not just because it was on MST3K. 

The thing is, unlike most schlock, what is advertised here is exactly what you get. The Incredible Man is about an Incredible Melting Man. And while the movie isn't incredible by any means, concentrating on a lot of random dinguses and boring "heroes" instead of the monster -- the fact is we see that sucker melt. And he melts at the hands of Rick Baker, who does a great job of making Steve West -- aka, Mr. Melting Astronaut -- look as fucking gross as possible. 

Because horror and SF media was fairly anemic before Star Wars changed film and fandom forever, the fan magazines hyped up whatever the hell cropped up in order to avoid putting the usual Universal and Hammer monsters on the cover. So crap like Laserblast and other low-budget losers would get trumpeted as the next beast thing (ha ha, get it? "beast thing"?) to hit the big screen. Unlike most of these stinkers, The Incredible Melting Man struck a chord in geek circles, because The Incredible Melting Man was, as I mentioned before, fucking gross. Straight up disgusting, a precursor of the walking corpses Fulci and company were about to unleash. If you look at a still of Melty Boy now you'd be forgiven for thinking it was taken from Hell of the Living Dead or Toxic Zombies or whatever Italy was getting ready to spit out at the world. Famous Monsters covers usually got about as outright icky as dusty ol' skull-headed Dr. Phibes, so a bloody human ice pop with a dripping eyeball was a real newsstand shock for me at the time.

Like many a kid, I was intrigued, disgusted and frightened by the Famous Monsters coverage of this movie. That one shot of the dripping mess with his eye hanging down was nightmare fuel for me. And the TV commercials really put it over. This fucking guy was going to melt. He was going to melt and attack anyone who got in his way. Would he melt all the way? Would I vomit if I go see this?

The jury's out on that last point. I didn't go see it because I was too scared. Or I didn't have the three bucks or whatever, or I fell asleep reading comic books and forgot to try to see it when it played. I was probably too scared to go. 

I didn't see it until a few years ago. It's not good. Astronaut returns to earth and gets all cruddy and shit, it's been done before and since. But he melts, and it's gross, and Rick Baker was clearly having a good time. As is usually the case, if the filmmakers were up to the level of the effects makeup folks, you'd have a humdinger of a movie on your melty hands. These folks were pretty inept. And supposedly, Baker made several more make-up stages for the Melting Man, but big-time acting juggernaut Alex Rebar refused to have them applied. Fucking big man, if true. Dude doesn't even have a Wikipedia page, wear the fucking appliances you prig. I'd fire anyone on a horror movie called The Incredible melting Man who balks at putting on the Incredible Melting Man melting man make-up. Fuck that guy. Unless it's not true and the producers balked. Then fuck those producers. Apologies to Alex Rebar if such is the case.

Actually, fuck me. I'm the one talking about this stupid movie. 

Spoilers: The guy melts. It's not incredible.