Review – The Green Slime

This Kinji Fukasaku production deserves its reputation as laughably bad. But a lot of the plot elements turn up in much better productions later – including The Thing and Alien – as well as less worthwhile productions such as Armageddon. The kiss of death here is the cheapness of the production. The spaceship effects are cool-terrible in a wouldn’t-it-be-fun-to-blow-up-some-models way, and the monsters are likewise as scary as schoolchildren in thick rubber suits can possibly be. All that could have been forgiven given the time and place of the production (the Japanese made a lot of movies of this caliber back in the 1960s). But the script is so awful it almost defies belief. The set-up is solid, but that’s only the first third of the movie. The rest is a relentless parade of guys with lasers versus the monsters. The “Green Slime” theme song is the final icing on the cake. Mildly amusing