Monster of the Day #249

I wonder if he’s most often seen as part of the cover of the first Psychotronic book.

I have a copy of it on semi-pirate DVD and when I showed it to my kids they were thrilled. They especially liked the scene with the overweight nurse running for seemingly hours down a deserted corridor until she bursts out through the glass door – it was like Sir Lancelot in Monty Python all over again.

And what’s with the main characters’ house layout. They have a bedroom IN THEIR LIVING ROOM? I guess they don’t ever plan to have kids? Plus there’s those huge windows letting anyone peek inside. Staggering.

I have very few good memories of this sucker. With it being on Netflix (as R. Dittmar said) I might give it a go once again.

Lord knows I’ve watched movies I disliked over and over again already…

What is thi? I know it’s an unhappy-astronaut-back-on-earth-after-an-unpleasant-experience-in-space movie. But which one?

@ Roger h- Love the Coupling reference. Brilliant show!

This one actually has really traumatic associations for me. I was about 5 (just checked IMDB, I was 4) and my parents took me out to see some sort of family film (it was either “Pete’s Dragon” or “The Wiz” but to this day I can’t swear which). The theater manager, in his infinite wisdom, decided that this was the perfect preview to show to a theater full of kids and I ended up with nightmares that lasted YEARS. To this day I have a hard time watching anything where someone melts and have never yet watched the whole scene where the Nazis open the Ark of the Covenant in the first Indiana Jones flick (which definitely retraumatized me on that subject).

Needless to say I felt REALLY silly when I finally caught this one on MST3K. A monster who can’t catch you because he’s too busy, you know, falling apart at you, just not scary.

I do remember an interview with Rick Baker on some mid-eighties show where he showed off the masks he built for this one, very cool stuff.

” A monster who can’t catch you because he’s too busy, you know, falling apart at you, just not scary”

Like the Black Knight without any arms or legs. I hope the MST3K version of this makes it to DVD.

I have seen the cover art for a DVD release under MGM’s Midnight Movies banner, or at least a video edition. If pressed, Sinister Cinema sells a print under the German title “Greetings From the Planet Saturn”! It’s a nice sharp print, scope, but I should point out my copy has a slight jitter effect. That doesn’t seem to be from the master, however.

I first saw the trailer for Incredible Melting Man on the Orion VHS for Reptilicus, which I still gladly own. I loved the tagline “The first NEW horror creature!”

Fun side note: Pop (the other Rick Baker) made a Melting Man halloween costume for my Mother when they were dating!

I haven’t ever seen this, but in a related note, the first movie I remember seeing — in a drive-in, no less — was RotLA. A few things stuck with me, but mostly that scene with the Ark at the end, and especially the melting head gag. Years later when I saw it again, I was shocked by how perfectly and vividly my young brain had captured Toht’s demise and held it through the years, because it was EXACTLY like I remembered. Unlike poor GJ, I was not traumatized. (That’d come later, when I caught a small part of The Exorcist, and to a lesser extent during the chestburster scene in Alien.)

The second feature that night was a Star Trek movie. I think it was the first one (although it could’ve been the second), but I ended up falling asleep very soon after it started (hey, it was late and I was very very young).

There’s a Super 8 version of Star Trek that runs about 60 minutes which is much more watchable. Despite the trimmed running time, you really can’t tell anything is missing either. Thalk about your movies stuffed with needless filler!