Fast forward to 1977, the year that American International Pictures and filmmaker William Sachs teamed up to create The Incredible Melting Man. A throwback to those old B-movies (particularly owing a big debt of gratitude to the 1959 flick First Man into Space), The Incredible Melting Man is an unfortunately dumb movie. Such was its eventual descent into obscurity that I probably wouldn't have even known it existed had it not appeared on Mystery Science Theater 3000 in 1996. And really, the only thing the movie has going for it are that MST3K episode and its effects. So let's dig in and see just where the movie went wrong.
As things get started, we're introduced to Steve West (Alex Rebar), an astronaut leading a three-man expedition to Saturn. Things unfortunately go haywire as soon as the movie begins, as we're not a minute in and the three astronauts are almost immediately exposed to a massive blast of radiation. Two of them are killed, while Steve suffers a pretty serious nosebleed before losing consciousness.
We next see Steve in a hospital bed, covered in bandages after having somehow managed to return to Earth. But as Steve awakens from his coma, he's horrified to discover that the radiation has caused his flesh to quite literally melt away. His condition having left him prone to fits of uncontrollable rage, Steve freaks out upon seeing himself in a mirror and escapes the hospital.
Dr. Ted Nelson (Burr DeBenning), a long-time friend of Steve's, is called in to help examine the body of a nurse that Steve attacked and partially devoured as he fled the hospital. Dr. Nelson realizes that Steve has gone completely insane and is now compelled to consume living human flesh as a means of slowing down the melting process. He contacts General Michael Perry (Myron Healy) of the Air Force to let him know that Steve has escaped. General Perry oversaw the Saturn expeditions and has been tasked with covering the whole thing up for some reason, so he agrees to help Dr. Nelson track Steve down. It's going to be a struggle for General Perry to keep this under wraps too, since there's only so long before the pile of eaten bodies and puddles of melted skin start become harder to hide from the cops.
Having seen the MST3K episode on more than one occasion, I knew ahead of time that The Incredible Melting Man wasn't a very good movie. But I didn't realize just how much of a mess it was until I sat down and watched it without the commentary of Mike Nelson and company. It's one of the most uneven movies I've ever seen, with both its good elements and its flaws spread out in such a way that it never finds any sort of rhythm.
This disaster was written and directed by William Sachs, whose less-than-stellar efforts on both fronts cause the whole thing to start circling the drain before it begins. From a directorial standpoint, Sachs's work is all over the place. There's some very good cinematography, but nothing makes sense from a storytelling standpoint. The editing is choppy, and the pace is so uneven that the movie ends up just being a tremendous bore.
It doesn't help that Sachs continually does a piss-poor job establishing things in relation to everything else. You never really get a feel that characters are ever in the same area. Instead of feeling like Dr. Nelson and General Perry are in the same town as the melting man, it comes off like they're on opposite ends of the state. It's like watching Plan 9 from Outer Space again.
Sachs's screenplay doesn't help matters much either. I've read that he had originally written the movie as a parody of '50s monster movies, which explains a lot of the more comedic moments in the movie. But even with that knowledge, the script still comes off as being really bad. It's full of plot holes and scenes that go nowhere that that it's no wonder the movie's pace is so uneven. Sachs doesn't take so much as a second to explain any real details behind what exactly caused Steve to start melting, or how he knows he needs to eat flesh to survive, or how he even managed to travel the 938 million miles from Saturn back to Earth without having melted into a puddle of goo in the six and a half years it would take to make that trip.
It also doesn't explain just how quickly the doctors figured out what happened to Steve so quickly. It could probably be blamed on the fact that Sachs never really tells us how long he'd been in that military hospital at the beginning of the movie. It honestly feels like Sachs chopped fifteen or twenty pages of exposition out of the script. And giving the movie an introduction or a setup to begin the movie would have been nice, too.
And just why is General Perry so concerned with keeping the whole situation covered up? If some melting cannibal is out there terrorizing the countryside, why send only a military bureaucrat and an ineffectual doctor after him? I get not telling the public, since it'd avoid mass panic, but why not bring in a SWAT team or the National Guard to hunt him down? It doesn't make any sense at all.
And then there are all the scenes that go nowhere and add nothing to the movie. There's the two old people who try to steal lemons, a couple of kids trying cigarettes for the first time, all kinds of talk about Dr. Nelson's wife being pregnant, and a model who keeps getting pressured to take her top off by a lecherous photographer, and none of it really matters whatsoever. Outside of choice encounters with the melting man, these scenes are good for nothing but padding. It's just a bunch of useless crap that any writer with some actual talent could have actually made work.
The acting isn't very good, either. Alex Rebar can't really do much as the titular melting man, but then he actually can't convey much through all that red slime he's wearing. It's not like there's any real material for him to work with, anyway. Myron Healy isn't all that great either, but his role is so minor that he might as well not even be in the movie. The biggest offender is Burr DeBenning, who is so stiff that he's boring. His character is not only written as an incompetent doofus, but DeBenning doesn't do anything to give anyone a reason to give a crap about him.
At least the movie boasts some great makeup effects. Put together by seven-time Oscar-winning effects wizard Rick Baker, the effects look pretty damn awesome. You can tell Baker didn't have a very huge budget to work with, but he still managed to make the melting man look as gross and as disgusting as possible. Baker's work is really the only reason at all to watch the movie.
If you haven't quite figured it out, The Incredible Melting Man was featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000 for a very good reason. But the problem with this particular bad movie is that its flaws really make it more boring than anything else. It's not the kind of bad movie that's still amusing or even fun to mock. You just want it to hurry up and end. If it weren't for Baker's effects, I'd tell you to skip the movie altogether. So I guess The Incredible Melting Man earns one and a half stars solely for the makeup alone. Just stick with the MST3K episode if you really want to see the movie.
Final Rating: *½
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