Greetings, readers.  It’s time to pull on our heavy-duty rubber gloves and stick our hands in something nasty once more, this time examining the “Melt” Movie.  What’s a “Melt” Movie, you ask? Glad you asked.  A “Melt” Movie is any film featuring a graphic depiction of human flesh bubbling and liquefying in a gruesome, gory, or gut-churning manner.  So while the Wicked Witch of the West’s demise in THE WIZARD OF OZ is a a melting scene, it does not make THE WIZARD OF OZ into a Melt Movie.  Toht loses his face pretty messily in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK upon opening the Ark of the Covenant, but it’s too small a scene to qualify RAIDERS as a Melt Movie.  So what does qualify as a Melt Movie?

Here are my five (well, six) favorites.

5.) THE DEVIL’S RAIN (1975)

Sometimes a movie just stuns you.  THE DEVIL’S RAIN does because of the cast list.  William Shatner and Tom Skerritt play brothers fighting against a Satanic cult led by Ernest Borgnine, and a young, pre-GREASE, pre-SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, pre-WELCOME BACK KOTTER John Travolta is one of Borgnine’s minions.  Anton LaVey served as technical supervisor for the Satanism.  Melting (or causing others to melt) into a waxy substance that resembles a blend of peach and lime sherbet seems to be the prime power demonstrated by Borgnine.  The film kicks off with Shatner and Skerritt’s father stumbling in out of the desert in the midst of a storm, bubbling and falling to bits before collapsing into sludge, and the film ends with a ten-plus-minute sequence of the defeated cultists wailing and moaning as they dissolve into puddles of waxy slime.

Every time I type out the title I keep having to stop myself from writing it as THE DEVIL’S REIGN.

4.) SLIME CITY (1988) and SLIME CITY MASSACRE (2010)

There’s no way I could avoid including these films, and there was no way I could pick just one for this spot.  Two tales of a cult of ectoplasmic possessors, the first focuses on Alex, a young man who unknowingly moves into an apartment building owned by the members of the cult, living in new, stolen bodies.  Tricking Alex into becoming a vessel for Zachary, the cult’s original leader, he soon begins going through changes.  Slime suppurates from his pores, homicidal mania overtakes him, and when punched in the gut, the fist goes right through…and gets severed! While he never melts down completely, Alex does get fairly slushy, and fountains Dayglo slime pretty readily during the final confrontation.

The sequel, SLIME CITY MASSACRE, taking place almost thirty years later, is a dystopian vision of a New York City decimated by a dirty bomb attack, become one giant, run-down refugee camp.  Into this venture a draft-dodger, Alexa, and her AWOL boyfriend Cory, soon joining forces with Mason and Alice, a pair of survivalists eking out a living in “Slime City.”  Before long, these four stumble across Zachary’s old stomping grounds, and the supply of possessing ectoplasm — disguised as “Himalayan Yogurt” — he left behind.  Soon they’re getting slimy and violent — and Alice, having “overdosed” on the “wine” that activates the ectoplasm, liquefies entirely, spending the middle portion of the film a disembodied face in a bathtub full of orange slime.  She eventually reforms in time for the titular Massacre, leading up to an explosive finale of fountaining green, blue, orange and pink slime as an enemy emerges from the Slimeheads’ past with cleaver in hand.

3.) THE INCREDIBLE MELTING MAN (1977)

Meet Astronaut Steve West.  After passing through a belt of cosmic radiation on a round-trip to Saturn, he’s gained incredible super-human powers…of cellular degeneration.  He is rapidly melting (ultra-gooey special make-up effects by a young Rick Baker — that’s Steve West in the image at the top of the article) and only by consuming human flesh is he able to slow his decay.  Fortunately, Dr. Nelson, Dr. Ted Nelson, is on his tail, trying to bring him back in for study.  Unfortunately, Dr. Nelson, Dr. Ted Nelson, is an idiot.  Most of the film is made up of a series of vignettes of Steve West stalking, terrorizing, and consuming random victims, including (in uncut prints of the film) the lovely and topless Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith.

2.) THE H-MAN (1958)

From director Ishiro Honda (of GOJIRA fame) comes another cautionary science-fiction film about the dangers of nuclear testing, with special effects by GOJIRA’s Eiji Tsuburaya.  When a minor-league drug smuggler disappears, leaving a pile of clothes behind, Detective Tominaga begins staking out the nightclub where the drug-runner’s girlfriend dances.  He hopes that she’ll lead him to the missing smuggler.  What he finds, however, is that the smuggler has transformed into a flowing, gelatinous “H-Man” through exposure to radioactivity.  Losing his mind, the H-Man “feeds” on human flesh, dissolving people to restore his own molten form.  The film even has a prophetic moral: “If man perishes from the face of the Earth, due to the effects of hydrogen bombing, it is possible that the next ruler of our planet may be The H-Man.”

1.) STREET TRASH (1987)

Anyone who knows Melt Movies knows this one had to come out on top.  Jim Muro’s sociopathic piece of cinematic anarchy (writer/producer Roy Frumkes has since explained, “I wrote it to democratically offend every group on the planet”) tells the bowel-weakening tale of a crate of expired wine — Tenafly Viper — sold to the local homeless population, sensibly priced at a dollar a bottle.  Upon consumption, Viper proves to be literal rotgut; a couple swallows are all that’s necessarily for the consumer to rapidly break down into vibrant Dayglo slime.  Rather plot-light, the appeal of STREET TRASH isn’t the story, but the parade of exploding/deliquescing psychotically-violent bums.  Decapitations, necrophilia, rape, vomit, parachute pants full of raw chicken and a truly-unforgettable game of “Keep Away” played with a man’s severed genitals round out the film.

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There you have it readers.  My top choices for films in which there is a focus on melting people.  Granted, this is not a huge subgenre, and if I’d made it a top-10 list, I might have exhausted it.  However, having not seen every Melt Movie yet, a Top-1o list is beyond my capabilities at the moment, so you’ll have to settle for this.

Tags: Anton LaVey, Ernest Borgnine, exploitation, Gore, Horror Movie, John Travolta, Slime City, Slime City Massacre, Street Trash, The Devil's Rain, The H-Man, The Incredible Melting Man, William Shatner