In these many years above ground, I have learned some pretty significant things – if you grow a pencil-thin mustache, you won’t look like Clark Gable (and will probably get arrested for being a creepoid), whenever someone is driving a staged car against a rear-projection screen they spin the wheel like crazy (the car would have flipped over the way they toss and turn), and finally, why always with cheesy monsters movies from this era must we have cheap jazz music like I was at a high school jazz band competition in Iowa (and we all know its probably the members of Jazz 2 instead of the better players)! However, those things seem minor when I try to think of why creatures that come from underground always want to attack us for some reason (maybe they live in a crappy part of the sewer). It is reported that star/director Robert Hutton spent half of the $80,000 budget on the Slime People costumes. Given so much attention focused on the cost of costumes, it appears Hutton let the fog machine budget slipe right through his producer’s butterfingers in the 1963 gunky sludge epic The Slime People!
Hutton has gone on record to state that stuntmen and he were never paid for this film. The real question is: Should anyone have been paid for this film at all (coulda, woulda, shoulda)? The answer is a mire no! The challenge with low-budget filmmaking from the 50s and 60s is their limitations on resources, and nothing much has changed, even to this day (although many Kickstarter campaigns will try to convince you otherwise). Bottom barrel talents, uneven production values, and never enough money to achieve the goals the script warranted, independent filmmaking like Hutton and team have done with this film can be a Catch-22 – either they’re so good they’re bad or they’re so bad they’re good (or so bad they are just bad). But what must always be recognized when films like this ooze their way into the Drive-Ins at least they put their money where their mouths were and made a movie! Heck, they made a movie that’s talked about to this day as you read about it! The film does deliver the goods as far as the monster’s make-up effects go, but the uneven acting, weird sound effects from the monsters (they sound like a clogged toilet at a rest stop in Ohio), and unnecessarily extreme use of smoke (seriously, John Carpenter had less haze in his movie The Fog) to make it for a long gloppy celluloid mudslide.
It’s a normal scuzzy day in great Los Angeles when a bunch of C.H.U.D.-like creatures, tired of us humans polluting their subterranean dwellings with atomic radioactivity (the nerve of them being upset with us destroying not only our planet but theirs also), decide to make an invisible wall around the city to kill all humans. For some odd reason, what they build is not a dome, so our hero pilot (played by Hutton in one of the best Gable rip-off mustaches and voice of all time) flies into LA to find it barren of civilization (wouldn’t that make everyone happy who have to drive on the 5). Convinced this is a real sticky situation, the pilot finds a soldier, a couple of (annoyingly) screaming women, and a scientist. Through their combined IQs, they realize the creatures can only be killed with their underground spears and arrows, and like a slug, can be killed with salt! Will our heroes save the world from becoming an enclosed habitat for bulky muck people, or will the slime people gunk up the ecosystem and destroy our existence? Anybody who loves good/bad cinema knows there’s not a fog of doubt gelatin molds like this will brighten up your dreary, cloudy day.
Gastroboding your way at a slithery seventy-six minutes, Hutton (whose only directing credit is this little muckraker) would spend the rest of his career acting in films like Trog and the Amicus version of Tales from the Crypt. You can find this bile air on most streaming platforms, but if you are a collector of physical media then make sure you get Rhino’s classic Horror VHS or the MST3K episode. So if you ever find yourself slammed against an invisible wall in the middle of the forest, you might want to check your weather report, because it could be underground slugs mad that you are watching this film on a TV running on nuclear power (talk about being salty)!
