The Green Slime, a Scary Love Triangle

The Green Slime (1969) is a wonderful B movie.  A Japanese sci-fi film that is actually American.  It is Japanese because of the director (Kinji Fukasaku, and be careful how you say that last name), the creatures are played by Japanese school children with neat costumes, and the plot.  It is American because of the male cast.  Even the Italian lead actress (Luciana Paluzzi, a Bond girl) plays an American, Dr. Lisa Benson.

Terrific plot!  A very large asteroid is heading toward our space station.  A crew is dispatched to the asteroid to place nukes on it which will blow it up before collision with the station.  This kind of works, as the asteroid is vaporized, but a tiny bit of green slime, unknowingly, is brought back with the crew.  This slime then keeps growing and separating, and before too long, the space station crew is at war with green slime monsters.  During this war, Dr. Lisa Benson (Paluzzi) heroically treats the wounded, while shielding her nurses from the electric grips of the slime creatures.  Unfortunately for her, her two boyfriends happen to be on board: the station's commander (Richard Jaeckel), who is a failure as far as space commanders go, and Commander Jack Rankin who NASA sent up there to take charge because of Jaeckel's incompetence.  Those two spend as much time fighting each other as they do the Japanese school children.

As heroic as Dr. Lisa Benson is, one wonders how she chooses her men.  Most women in these movies want a good looking, sensitive guy with a sense of humor.  Not her!  She prefers the boring stupid, grouchy kind who keep screwing up, and who have no senses of humor or sensitivity.  You pick the wrong guy, and you could very easily get overrun by monstrous Japanese school kids.

The ending is exciting, and the opening score is wonderful.  The cover art is classic.  Unfortunately that astronaut-ette who appears on the cover does not appear in the movie.  Oh yes, the opening score actually puts a melody to the lyrics "The Green Slime," and it is most catchy.