Perhaps the most amazing part of our viewing of The Incredible Melting Man (1977) is that my Arts Editor and I actually managed to watch the whole wretched thing. Let’s make this simple: take all the facets of the movie and rate them on a scale of 0 through 9. Set them all to 0.
The audio is good, give it an 6.
Same for the cinematography, call it a 6 for adequate work.
We have to give the acting a 4, primarily because of the efforts of the antagonist’s actor, as well as an elderly couple who played an old woman and her lover, ridiculously in love with each other, who had an easy, kitchy chemistry. I found their arguments over whether or not they should steal oranges and lemons from an orchard to be charming. All the rest of the acting? 0! So the average is 4.
And makeup gets an 8. It was, for the era, really quite macabre, a creepy, gelatinous mess that was, if not convincing, enough to make your skin crawl – right before you, too, started melting.
Everything else was terrible.
Normally I do not read other reviews when writing my own, but this time I couldn’t help but wonder how this amateur effort possibly made it out of any self-respecting studio, and, according to Wikipedia, the producers messed with the show:
The screenplay was originally intended as a parody of horror films, but comedic scenes were edited out during production and new horror scenes added. [Director] Sachs claims that the producers decided during shooting that a straight horror film would be more financially successful, and that the film suffered as a result.
And yet …
The film was commercially successful …
