User Reviews

I was thinking that the main character, the astronaut with the bad case of the runs(in his case, his skin, hair, muscles, etc) could always get more movie work after he'd been reduced to a puddle. All he has to do is get a job as the Blob. The premise of this flick is pretty lame. An astronaut gets exposed to sunspot radiation(I think), and so begins to act like an ice cream cone on a hot day. Not only is this a puzzler, but apparently he has to kill humans and consume their flesh so that he can maintain some kind of cell integrity. Huh? Have you ever noticed that whenever any kind of radiation accident or experiment happens, the person instantly turns into a killing machine? Why is that?

The astronaut lumbers off into the night from the 'secret facility'(which has no security whatsoever), shedding parts of himself as he goes. Apparently he retains just enough memory to make him head for the launch pad, maybe because he wanted to return to space.

Thus begins the part of the movie that's pretty much filler, with a doctor wandering around with a Geiger counter, trying to find the melting man by the buzz he gives off. He kills a stupid Bill Gates look-alike fisherman, scares a little girl a la the Frankenstein monster movie, and finishes off a wacky older couple(punishing them karmically for stealing some lemons). Then there's a short scene where he whacks his former General, and a very long scene where he kills a young pothead and chases his girlfriend around. You'd think that after she cuts his arm off and he run away, the scene would shift. But no...we're treated to about ten minutes of the woman huddled into a corner panting and screaming in terror, even though the monster is gone. All I could think was..director's girlfriend, anyone?

The end of the movie is even lamer than the rest of it. The melting man finishes turning into a pile of goo, and then...nothing. That's it. That's the end of the movie. Well, at least that meant that there was no room for a sequel.

The plot of " Astronuat returns to Earth as a mutating monster " died out in the 1950s mainly down to the scientific fact that travelling outside the Earth's orbit doesn't humans cause to turn in to mutated monsters , and that the first film to use this plot THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT was the only decent sci-fi movie to use the idea . So the idea of having the redundant plot return seems doomed from the start . Alas watching THE INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN it seems the plot is the least of its problems

First of all this is an incredibly badly made movie . The budget is in single figures and I'm talking about lira not dollars . There is no cinematography to speak of and there's countless editing blunders . For example a photographer takes his ( Barely legal ) model for a photo shoot . Cut to a shot where the sun is directly behind model , then cut to shot of photographer where the sun is directly behind him, then cut back to the model where the sun is ...

The lack of budget drags the film down in other aspects too . According to the trivia page the budget was so low the producers couldn't get any stock footage of Saturn so when astronaut Steve West mentions how beautiful Saturn looks we get footage of the sun . Actually the sun gives the most impressive performance in the film since the human actors wouldn't be employed by a porn studio . If I was appearing in this I wouldn't be scared by the eponymous monster - I'd be terrified of splinters from the rest of the cast . Perhaps we should be slightly forgiving though since the obvious lack of budget manifests itself in things like the actors having to wear their own clothes . A general for instance doesn't wear his nice fancy dress uniform complete with medals - he wears a denim jacket and baseball cap

There has to be suspension of disbelief for a film like this to work but it fails on every level . The tone is set early on in the film where Mr Melty murders a nurse and escapes from the hospital . Instead of the police getting a call saying there's been a murder Dr Nelson just decides to track down his patient on his own own same as he'd look for a missing cat . It's also strange a thoroughly decomposing homicidal monster can walk down the road without anyone noticing , but this is typical of a film where horny 70 year olds stop their car down dark roads for a quickie and people nonchalantly mention their wife is pregnant whilst forgetting to tell the police that there's a monster on the loose .

THE INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN is Z grade rubbish . I can certainly understand why people enjoy this movie because it does reach the heights of " It's so bad it's good " but apart from Rick Baker's sometimes impressive make up effects it's nothing more than a very guilty pleasure

I think that my favorite part of this movie, the one that exemplifies the sheer pointless, stupidity and inanity of the proceedings, comes at the climax of the film. DOCTOR TED NELSON and his unmarried friend the Sheriff have finally cornered the Melting Man on a landing on some stairs in an electrical generating plant. Keep in mind that Nelson has been looking for the MM for nearly the entire film, and that the MM has killed and eaten several people at this point (including his boss), and Nelson is very aware that MM is violently insane and hungry for human flesh and blood.

So the Sheriff has his gun pointed at MM, who is, and I give the movie and Rick Baker props for this, the most disgusting and terrifying object in human form that we have ever seen. And he yells a very important question to DOCTOR TED NELSON: "WHAT DO WE DO NOW?!?!?"

The camera cuts over to DOCTOR TED NELSON, and it's obvious that Ted has no idea what to do next. Apparently Ted was so intent on the problem of FINDING the Melting Man, he never thought to bring along some restraining devices, a lasso, or straitjacket, or a net, or some tranquilizer darts, or maybe a New Age tape by Vangelis to soothe the savage beast.

So the sheriff panics and shoots, the Melting Man goes berserk, and hilarity ensues.

Maybe this explains why NASA has been screwing around with the Space Shuttle program in sub-lunar space for the last 30 years instead of going back to the Moon or out to Mars like everyone knows they OUGHT to be doing. I dunno.

Anyway, that's the kind of lousy, lazy writing and direction that undercuts every aspect of this movie. It's hard to say how good the actors actually are, because the movie has complete contempt for their characters.

Two other incredibly painful sequences also ramp up the stupidity of the proceedings: There is a scene featuring the lumpiest old couple in the world trying to steal lemons from a grove, only to be torn apart by the Melting Man. This scene is a nadir in 70s cinema. I can guarantee you've never watched a more pointless and irritating setup with odder looking people in your entire life. And the Melting Man's assault on the lady who lives in the house where they keep a horse who pees on the walls defies every attempt to process it.(BTW, I think famous film director Jonathon Demme has a walk-on in this scene as the redneck husband who goes in first to check on the house and never comes out again). The only thing that keeps the actress from literally chewing the scenery is that, as I said, their horse has apparently been peeing on it. And we are forced to watch her hysterics for at least two minutes longer than any SANE film director would hold the shot.

Burr DeBenning ought to beat the crap out of IMM's director and photographer. I remember him from an old Columbo episode where he looked MUCH better than he does here - no one's idea of a leading man, but solid and unobtrusive. But no one could possibly be as unappealing in real life as his director makes him look here.

Everyone else comes off a little better except for the old couple (and shut up, I know they were being played for laughs, but I ain't laughing!) but not much.

This definitely falls into the 'So Bad You Can't Look Away' category of cinema disasters. Still, I'd watch it again before I'd watch a lot of other 70's and 80's abortions ( "Track of The Moonbeast" and "It Lives By Night" come to mind), and MST's coverage of it is great fun, so if you get a chance, watch the MST version.

I first saw this cruddy little cheapie back in the late 70's when it played on a double bill with 'The Savage Bees' at my local flea-pit.

Being an impressionable teenager, I was 'blown away' by all the blood, guts and goo on show, and left the cinema believing i'd just witnessed a sci-fi horror masterpiece.

Thirty years later, I purchased the DVD and sat down to watch it with my partner. Thirty minutes later, we realised this particular 'Melting Man' should have been left dead and buried in the 1977 trashcan he winds up in along with my rose-tinted memory.

For what it's worth, an astronaut on a space mission flies his craft too close to the sun (or something) and returns to earth to embark on a rampaging trail of mutilation and murder whilst layer after layer of skin melts off his bones. And that's it.

Production values are rock bottom, the direction corpselike, the editing looks like the work of a visually impaired person using their teeth and the acting is uniformly awful which, when all is said and done, at least gives it some consistency.

Rick Baker's Melting Man make-up fx seemed awesome at the time, but now the title character just resembles someone that looks like they fell into a vat of Ben & Jerry's chocolate ice-cream.

And even though it's still the best thing in the movie, the scene with a severed head bursting open at the bottom of a waterfall, is nowhere near as graphic as I remember. But hey, that's memories for ya.

First of all if there's one thing I can tell you, with one-hundred percent certainty, it's the fact that there's absolutely nothing remotely "incredible" about the movie "The Incredible Melting Man".

The title of this movie should really be "The Many Shortcomings of Dr. Ted Nelson". Because that's what's going on for the majority of this profoundly mediocre movie, yet another example of lame and forgettable B-Grade Schlock-Cinema. On all counts The Incredible Melting Man is a very amateurish effort, a tepid combination of Sci-Fi and Horror, which ultimately is quit pointless and for the next 84 minutes boredom and disbelief will be your two primary emotions. Which is something I know quit well, having seen the MST3K-version of this movie several times, I find that there are few movies that do less or have a weaker plot than The Incredible Melting Man - not to mention the films glowing star-power! The cast of this movie is as bland and as forgettable as you'll ever see and that couldn't be more true when one mentions the actor Burr DeBenning, who is the movies star and main character and also Blandness Personified. If one were to waste their time rating individual actors, it's really hard to think of one who had less charisma or screen presence than Burr DeBenning and really what kind of a name is that anyway?

The films feeble and poorly defined plot involves a trio of space explorers who are presumably irradiated "by the rings of Saturn" ... or something like that, one of them "Steve" initially survives and makes it back to Earth, only he's not the same man that he was, and thus goes on to become: The Incredible Melting Man! There's really very few important details involving plot once Dr. Ted Nelson (Burr DeBenning) makes his grand entrance and for the next 84 minutes this movie is nothing more than a series of bland and uninspired events (a true master-class of mediocrity in the movies), all of which falls right in line with what I said about this movie being pointless. The film proceeds to play out in a series of loosely connected occurrences (many of which are entirely mundane), which are happening somewhere in one of the less densely populated areas of southern California. One can't help but sense that the cast of this movie seems to be aware of just how bad the material is and are completely bored and indifferent to it, not surprisingly this negatively affects their acting, which is as flat, as it is uninspired. As you'll see.

From a visual stand-point this films just miserable; a murky combination of scenes, which when not showing-off someones riveting home life, are a mess of under-lit and poorly composed night scenes, that primarily focus on showing the melting man pointlessly ambling around various locations while committing a few murders. The murder scenes in this film are lamely carried out in a series of quick cuts or in some cases not shown at all, thus leaving us to just presume that a grizzly murder has taken place. The main thing that keeps Dr. Ted Nelson busy throughout the movie, other than entertaining General Perry and arguing with his wife about them being out of crackers, is when he's actively searching for the melting man with his trusty "Detectron" Geiger-counter and repetitively yelling "Steve - It's Dr. Ted Nelson, I want to help you" over and over. Another reason why this movie is so underwhelming (besides it's minuscule budget) and so utterly uninvolving, is because the very existence of the melting man is a closely guarded government secret, one that's on a strictly need-to-know basis or at least those were the General's orders.

One character who does inject some energy into this otherwise slow-going movie is the local Sheriff; who after at least four murders finally gets filled in on the situation, which leads up to the movies tepid and illogical conclusion. In the middle of the night Ted and the Sheriff track the melting man, by following his radioactive "pools" to a large and curiously accessible power-plant, where the final encounter is to happen. Here the movie ends even less logically than how it started, such as the melting man's "powers" increasing in potency as he literally loses limbs and further proceeds to melt, which even for an Incredible "Melting" Man, is evidently an unhealthy state to find yourself in. The logic of this movie is riddled with holes and plagued by one ponderous and poorly-acted scene after another and I know that it comes as a shocker, but this movie possesses many of the qualities which are typical of that of a bad movie. Gasp! Say it ain't so. Yet depending on how you see it it can be fun, as it should come as no surprise this movie was featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000 and I would definitely recommend that version, if any.

My favorite part of The Incredible Melting Man, other than the "cracker conversation", is that just seconds earlier the movie introduced a great new "comic-book word" to the rest of the world. Which is heard when Dr. Ted Nelson carelessly burns his hand on a hot pot and yells out loud >>> OTCH-GHA!!! <<< all while wearing a dorky-looking, brown, turtle-neck - but hey, this was filmed in the 70's after all. One last thing and that is the fact that this Sci-Fi film was released somewhere in the latter half of 1977, which officially places it in the Star Wars Era (Stars Wars mania was rolling at full-tilt at the time), which when compared to those icons of the genre, only serves to make this excruciatingly amateurish excursion into Sci-Fi seem all the more pathetic.

Conclusion: Apart from Rick Baker's FX, The Incredible Melting Man is profoundly lame and was obsolete immediately upon release.

There's nothing like seeing the sun from the rings of Saturn! That basically sums up the theme of this deliciously bad and funny science fiction/horror film that has to be seen to be believed. Basically a rip-off of the atom age science fiction movies of the 1950's and 60's, this is too funny to pass up, yet too gory for some audiences to watch without turning their face away. It is one of those "Come back from outer space and see what you turn into!" themed space films, and boy, what happens to the astronaut here isn't a fate you'd wish on your worst enemy, probably because you know he'd be trying to chow down on your face for dinner. Lots of dripping goo will give the "eew" factor to audiences not expecting it, but there are also plenty of seemingly intentional laughs here in spite of the carnage.

Burr DeBenning is the handsome scientist, Dr. Nelson, whose old friend Steve has become a walking Frankenstein's monster, to quote one little girl who encounters him like the little girl did Karloff and Peter Boyle, and at least at the hands of Karloff didn't live to regret it. A fisherman encounters more than a bear and "heads up" (or off), the shot of the poor man's face floating down a river of no return onto an obvious man-made waterfall and plopping down as if it was an Alaskan salmon. That was the first of many laughs for me, and I settled back in preparation for a treat of horror comedy that both grossed me out and tickled my funny bone, although a few sequences were extremely disturbing.

The funniest sequence comes with the car ride of Dr. Nelson's seemingly old crone of a mother-in-law (a hysterical Dorothy Love), kissing her boyfriend as he drives, then nagging him to stop to pick oranges, which actually turn out to be lemons. The tension increases as the monster oozes his way through the lemon grove, stalks Dr. Nelson's house, encounters a turkey leg eating general, and eventually ends up in some sort of power plant like James Cagney fighting to get to "the top of the world". Another hysterical sequence has a young couple coming home to find oozing blood on their open door, and the poor girl actually pushing a refrigerator in front of the door and chopping off a hand while going slowly insane over what she's encountered. For a local sheriff, his encounter with the gooey creature turns out to be totally electrifying!

Containing some of the most ridiculous attempts at serious conversations I've seen in a film, one whole segment deals with Dr. Nelson's pregnant wife and him arguing over her forgetting to pick up crackers. It goes on and on, seemingly pointless, yet the same pointless attempt at serious conversation with mother-in-law Love just continues to get so hysterical, I longed for it to continue. She wants to stop to call to let her daughter know she's late, even though they are just a few minutes from there. Then, she wants to stop and get them chocolates or flowers, denying that she wants the chocolates for herself yet agreeing that flowers die too quickly. Hence the sudden decision to pick citrus fruit when you're already late, a segment that reminded me of Billie Burke's insistence on eating cake in somebody else's house while searching for her missing husband in "Topper Returns".

This is fast and funny, yet there is a serious message attached to the plot line that keeps repeating through the monster's memory of being an astronaut and encountering rays from the sun as seen from many millions of miles away. What are we going to outer space for when we don't know what sort of horrors we might bring back, and while it isn't mentioned, destroying our own atmosphere at the same time? So when a bad movie still makes you think about the impact that human beings are having on the world that we're supposed to be content with and try to continue to nurture, there is some purpose to it. The ending is very downbeat and ironic, with a janitor finding the mess of the night before, and simply sweeping it all up and tossing it away as the shot of another spacecraft prepares to take off.

With one of the greatest film titles of all time 'The Incredible Melting Man' is only really notable for one thing, the amazingly good make-up effects from Rick Baker. Indeed poor astronaut Steve West does melt as he walks through the landscape, losing a bit of flesh here, an ear there etc until his final dissolution outside a factory at the end of the film. The movie does have comic moments (the hilarious old couple looking for lemons) but there is a bleakness too. By the end the doctor, the general and several police are dead and Steve West gets swept up and put in a dustbin as just trash leaving only the doctor's pregnant wife left. No laughing matter there then. You can criticise the acting, the music score and the cinematography but I found the movie kept my attention until the end.

First saw the film at the cinema (in beautiful Manchester) when it came out in 1977. The only thing I remembered was the severed head going over the waterfall in slow motion. It still haunts me to this very day.

I first learnt of this film's existence by walking past a cinema at the tender age of 4 and seeing a poster for the double bill of this and a TV movie that was shown theatrically in the UK called The Savage Bees (to be reviewed tomorrow night). Even the poster for this genius double bill of terror messed me up psychologically as I was obsessed with the idea of the villains of both films coming to get me when I was least expecting it.

I finally saw The Incredible Melting Man years later on TV- and loved it. It harks back to the horror films made for drive-ins in the 1950s. The plot involves three astronauts going on an expedition to Saturn ("You've never seen anything til you've seen the Sun through the rings of Saturn"). But something goes wrong and the only surviving astronaut, Steve West comes back to Earth to find that his body is slowly melting. We find out that to slow this down Steve who is now insane, must consume human flesh to decelerate the decomposing process.

This film is ripe for people to call it 'so bad its good' as if its absolutely terrible. It isn't- and not by a long chalk.

Yes, sometimes the acting is a little, erm, natural shall we say (the actress who plays the mother who stops off to steal lemons reminded me of Edith Massey from John Waters' films. Yes, her acting is that raw!).

But there's also some of the best special effects I've ever seen which were crafted by a young Rick Baker. Yes, the Rick Baker who won seven Oscars (take that cinema elitists). The melting effects are very aesthetically pleasing and the scenes in which El Melto sheds an eyeball and leaves his oozing ear on a bush have to be seen to be believed. Watching a severed head splat on a rock after going down a waterfall in slow motion is also a beautiful sight for horror fans.

There's also a cameo by a young Jonathan Demme as the boyfriend of a teenage girl played by none other than Janus Blythe who played Ruby in The Hills Have Eyes. Her performance is brilliant. I love any character that goes mad at the horror of what has just occurred. She does a great job with her character alternately crying and laughing manically.

But there's also a greater depth to this film. There are many scenes of West walking up and down hillsides with the sun setting behind him and with the sounds from the expedition in his head. These scenes show Steve to be completely alone and nomadic. West is a melting freak but not through choice and is so grotesque that he's utterly ostracised and feels completely separated from the rest of the human race. These sequences reminded me of the melancholic piano music at the end of each episode of The Incredible Hulk or the underlying sadness to the TV programme The Littlest Hobo. The audience feels pity for West and his condition rather than his character being a two-dimensional grotesque baddie with no other sides to his persona.

There's also a heartbreaking scene wherein Steve reaches a barrel of water on his wonderings and sees his reflection that makes him cry out and place his head in his heads.

This film also possesses a scene which is the hallmark of a really messed up movie- someone runs through glass. A nurse runs through a plate glass door after seeing Steve's face when he removes his bandages for the first time. If this 'running/throwing yourself through glass' scene is in a film you know its special and that you're watching high art. The scene appears twice in Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), twice in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984) and once in Halloween 2 (1981)- all great, messed up pieces of cinema.

Any film that features the lead character melt in a great big pool of ooze at the end and is then seen being swept up and placed into a trash can by a janitor is A-OK with me.

The next time someone tells you that The Incredible Melting Man is one of the worst movies ever made tell them to get lost.. They wouldn't know great entertainment if they fell over it.

When American International Pictures started hyping The Incredible Melting Man, they went all out. And by all out, I mean they gave in to the sinister urge to varnish the truth. A poster for the film had this statement on it: "Rick Baker, the new master of special effects, who brought you the magic of The Exorcist and gave you the wonder of King Kong, now brings you his greatest creation, The Incredible Melting Man."

The poster upset William Friedkin so much he tore it off someone's wall. Sure, Baker had assisted Dick Smith on The Exorcist, but he admitted, "I really didn't do anything creative, I just did labor" in a public apology for a publicity campaign that he had nothing to do with.

That said - Baker's effects for the film are perfectly goopy, gory and great. He created a skull-shaped flesh-painted helmet that Alex Rebar would don, then Baker would cover him with more paint and Dick Smith's recipe for blood - methyl paraben, corn syrup, water and powdered red and yellow food coloring (and a few ounces of Photo-Flo), ending up with such a mess that Rebar would need to peel the costume off at the end of each shooting day.

I knew none of this as I grew up in Western Pennsylvania. One day in 1977, I was simply looking at Halloween costumes in a Revco drug store at the Shenango Valley Mall. As I gazed at the various Imagineering makeup kits - like THE FACE made with FLEX-O-SKIN - I came upon a sight that would possess my every waking moment for the next several months.

The Incredible Melting Man makeup kit.

I stood, mouth agape and frozen in fear, like how the characters in an H. P. Lovecraft story act when their mind is decimated by an elder god (or how a librarian in a Fulci movie simply sits and waits for a spider to eat his face). Then I started screaming and ran from the store. I paced outside, waiting for my parents and brother to emerge (back in the 70's, parents would simply sit their kids in front of the toy department or magazine rack while they shopped, because we didn't know about abductions yet). The entire ride home, I kept replaying the image of that face melting away, convinced that because I had touched the box that my own visage would soon fall apart and I'd die, a mess in the back of my parent's stationwagon.

I had no idea that The Incredible Melting Man was a movie. All I knew was that I lived in mortal terror and my nightmare would never end.

When I finally saw the movie, I discovered that maybe I was afraid for no reason.

Directed and written by William Sachs, this was intended to be a parody of horror films but ended up being a straight scare movie and suffered as a result. It's still a blast and Baker's effects are pretty great.

Poor Colonel Steve West (Rebar). His mission to Saturn ended with both his fellow astronauts dead and his face and hands melted off. He spends most of the movie randomly showing up and killing couples, as well as getting his arm chopped off by an axe before suffering that most bleak of all movie big bad deaths: he's mopped up by a janitor the next morning.

The horrifying visuals that haunted my childhood dreams aren't nearly as frightening as I thought they would be. Years of not watching this was just wasting my time. I'm goign to mentally send young Sam a message and tell him to get that makeup kit.

Rainbeaux Smith shows up as a model and that's usually all it takes for me to watch a movie.