S01E08 - The Slime People

Plot

Short: The saboteurs manage to obtain their necessary funds and continue their objective of softening Earth's defenses, which includes dropping a nuclear bomb into a volcano to cause a chain reaction that creates devastating floods. Cody and his friends manage to sniff out some of the saboteurs' henchmen, which again leads to a climactic gun battle.

Film: A race of mutated slime uses a machine to generate a thick dome of fog above the city of Los Angeles, trapping many people inside. The slime people plan on isolating the atmosphere and dropping the temperature so that they can survive above ground. A reporter, a marine, and a scientist and his two daughters decide to band together to stop these slime monsters from claiming the ground for themselves.


Movie Review

It's getting really difficult to find anything interesting in Commando Cody's uninteresting serial shorts. The writers seem desperate to come up with something that will maintain people's interest in the ongoing story, and so they give us this clunker in which Cody gets into not one but two battles with the moon men's hired henchmen. Outside of the hilariously ridiculous nuclear bomb-volcano plot point, much of the plot here is recycled from previous episodes, from the fist fights to the kidnapping to the gun battle. And, to top it all off, they make Cody an idiot for that desired cliffhanger (seriously, he didn't think the second henchman was hiding nearby to pounce on him or, in this case, throw a rock at him?). How much more of Cody must we endure before it is all over?

At least there's the main feature to soften Cody's bitter taste. The Slime People is a beautiful product of its time: mutated monsters vs a rag-tag band of nobodies. Throw in unrealistically developed love relationships, a brilliant deduction at figuring out the monsters' weakness, and a climactic final battle only a select few (and not an entire army) could win, and you have the perfect generic monster movie.

This movie is also particularly (in)famous for its heavy use of fog machines, a film tactic the film makers had apparently hoped to use to heighten tension in the slime people's territory. Instead, the heavy fog obscures practically everything in the scenes, from the actors to the sets. The fog gets so thick in some places that no viewer (even with a clean copy of this film) can make out just what is going on. Good luck trying to figure out who is who in the thick soup of fog - I lost track several times and even mistook one of the protagonists for a slime monster at one point.

Of course, even without the thick fog, the film itself is a mess. The characters are the same awfully acted caricatures found in dozens of creature features from this era. As an example of how much effort went into these characters' development, one of the girls calls her father a "science professor." Not a chemist, not a physicist, not a biologist, but a "science professor." Hoo-boy. The rest don't fare any better. The main heroes are a reporter and a marine...and that's it. The two girls, meanwhile, are nothing but props to act as love interests, scream on cue, and get kidnapped by the evil slime monsters.

The latter point is of particular interest to show just how shoddy the writing is. The movie establishes early on that the slime people are primitive (they kill with sharp sticks) and kill anyone they see. But then one of the slime people kidnaps one of the girls (who is an airhead) and doesn't kill her. The movie tries to explain this by suggesting the slime people hope to draw them out to save her, but nothing suggests the slime people are this intelligent. The fact that they rescue her by finding her in a field, unguarded, further emphasizes this.

The monsters themselves are actually pretty decent. Yes, it's difficult to tell what they really look like with all the fog obscuring the costumes, but the slime people actually look pretty good as costume monsters go. Given a better movie, they could've been used more appropriately; in this train wreck, however, they're nothing more than lumbering masses. Naturally, they fall prey to the "how can these slow monsters be so terrifying" trope, especially considering they (off screen) fought the army at the film's beginning. How did the military lose to these things when they have pointy sticks and the military has everything else?

Overall, it's a forgettable creature feature, and it is made more easily forgettable thanks to the fog machines obscuring half the movie.


MST3K Review

Last episode's Commando Cody riffs were stale and bored, but in this episode Joel and the bots sound a bit more interested. Perhaps the stress of trying to make two serial episodes back-to-back can be wearisome, while a single episode provides a bit more breathing room. It also helps that there were a few bits in this serial episode that were perfect for riffing.

As for the movie, this is one of the better episodes of season one so far. While it doesn't top the genius that was Robot Monster, it is still a very enjoyable joke-fest on a generic and cliche monster movie with a broken gimmick (the fog machines). Still, Joel, Tom, and Crow still have the annoying tendency to a lot of times speak their lines over dialogue in the film (it may be poorly acted and poorly written dialogue, but I still want to hear it), while leaving long spaces with nothing to say. Some people may prefer this tempered and easygoing pace to the more frantic pace of the Sci-Fi years, but to me it feels unprofessional. Despite this, The Slime People stands as a gem of the first season.