Who Wants Ice Cream?

Film: The Incredible Melting Man
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

I’ve heard it said before that people shouldn’t remake good movies. We already have good versions of those stories, so it’s fair to ask how many additional, potentially good versions of that story we need. There have been what, four different Spider-Man series in the last three decades or so? And how many times do we need to see Bat-man’s origin? No, what we need is remakes of bad movies. Give a story that might have had some legs a second chance if it was screwed up the first time. And then, we get a movie like The Incredible Melting Man, and we learn that this might not be such a good idea after all.

See, this movie feels very much like a remake of a number of terrible science fiction movies from the ‘50s and ‘60s. Any movie from that era where men come back from space and something terrible happens to them (The Crawling Hand) or we get attacked by a single, slow-moving creature (The Creeping Terror), or a nuclear accident makes someone go crazy (The Beast of Yucca Flats) can be seen in this one. But, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, the movie that this is the closest to is the grade-z clownshow Monster a Go-Go.

What is that? Well, in Monster a Go-Go, an American astronaut returns to Earth and, for some reason, turns into an 8’ tall radioactive monster who walks around and terrorizes people until he eventually vanishes (and we’re told in voiceover that the astronaut, who was missing, appeared thousands of miles away). We get a lot of shots of the monster lurching around, and people being terrorized by something that is not at all terror inducing. The end.

And, frighteningly, The Incredible Melting Man is almost the exact same movie. In this film, though, a group of three astronauts are flying through the rings of Saturn when their spacecraft is hit by a blast of radiation. This kills two of the astronauts immediately, while the third manages to survive…somehow, on his own with severe radiation burns, for the approximately 38 months it would take to get home. And just to demonstrate that this didn’t happen during a Saturn trip but while they were at Saturn, one of the astronauts comments on seeing the sun through the rings of Saturn.

Anyway, regardless of this, surviving astronaut Steve West (Alex Rebar) wakes up in the hospital to see himself essentially melting—his skin is sloughing off and it drives him insane. He kills his nurse (in one of the funniest slow-motion sequences ever filmed) and goes on the lam. We learn eventually that he needs human cells to survive, which means that he’s going to start killing and eating people. His friend and doctor, Ted Nelson (Burr DeBenning), along with General Michael Perry (Myron Healey) start attempting to track him down, and attempting to deal with the local sheriff (Michael Alldredge), who is naturally concerned with the increasing body count of half-eaten people.

And that’s pretty much it. Steve West continues to melt (and we learn that his mind is essentially gone as well aside from a few flashes now and then) and attempts to halt his melting by consuming human cells. And other people try to track him down, and usually show up a little too late.

There’s literally only one thing to talk about here that isn’t ridiculous, and that’s the make up effects. These aren’t fantastic, but they are suitably gory and slimy. Our melting man really does look like he’s melting. He’s constantly covered in slime and goo, and in places genuinely looks like his skin has peeled away. I would imagine that when this came out in 1977, there were more than a few people who enjoyed it specifically because of the gore.

But that’s really it. There’s nothing else here that is even mildly interesting. The monster is gory, but kind of dumb. Most of the people are frighteningly stupid. And worse, there are attempts at comic relief that not only fall flat, but that are concluded by the comic relief being attacked, killed, and eaten by a melting astronaut. And—and I’m going to spoil the end here—this ends as nihilistically as possible. Everyone dies, and our astronaut melts completely and gets washed off the sidewalk by a janitor while we listen to the next lift-off to Saturn on the radio.

This is not only filled with giant plot holes, it’s not worth thinking about to fill those plot holes. I watched this so that you don’t have to, but if you do find yourself compelled to watch this, I’d go with episode 704 of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Why to watch The Incredible Melting Man: You should watch at least one MST3K movie without Mike/Joel and the bots.
Why not to watch: It’s essentially a bad remake of a bad movie.