Flicks: The Incredible Melting Man (1977)

Before becoming the Incredible Melting Man, Steve West was a mime who pretended to turn to stone. That's pretty ironic, right?

May is Melting Man Month at the Sleaze Blender! What better way to begin this merry month of melting then with the seminal Incredible Melting Man (1977)?

Since it's original release in the late 1970's The Incredible Melting Man has achieved enduring infamy as one of the most shocking and horrifying movies made in America. The flick lives on, near and dear your ol' pal the Sleaze-A-Saurus' heart in the same way that Bela, Boris and Lon Chaney do - with a toothy gravestone grin.

It should be noted that The Incredible Melting Man was Rick Baker's first picture as a Make-Up artist. The venerable Baker recently won an Oscar in 2010 for the awful Wolf Man re-make starring Benicio "The Samoan" del Toro. This award is interpreted, by some, as a retro-active Oscar for his eye-popping work on The Howling, An American Werewolf In London, Micheal Jackson's Thriller and David Cronenberg's Videodrome.


References:
IMDB, The Incredible Melting Man (1977)
IMDB, Rick Baker

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Flicks: Street Trash (1987)

Street Trash: it's easy to find us - we're all over the place.

May is Melting Man Month at the Sleaze Blender! All month long The Sleaze-A-Saurus will be featuring the best of 60 years of jellified manlings captured on tape with the magic of cinema.

The genre of Melting Men is much larger than you'd first imagine. Simply ponder this, scaleless manling: any action movie or TV show that you've ever viewed contains at least one shot of a man one fire - introducing you to a small portion of a sub-genre of Action and Horror known as the Incredible Melting Man. Not very coincidentally, cult classic The Incredible Melting Man (1977) was a movie that firmly capitalized specifically on this inter-genre craze.

Director Jim Muro's Street Trash features an enterprising manling who industriously decides to sell a substance labeled Viper to his exclusive clientele of hobos, winos and derelicts for the reasonable price of 1 Earth dollar per bottle. Once consumed, the liquid painfully reduces it's victim to a pile of colorful ooze and a few singed bones.

Muro is known as one of the best Steadicam operators in the business. Street Trash utilized the freedom of the Steadicam to go into dingy settings in New York's Bowery instead of attempting to re-create the same level of filth and scum in the studio. Muro went onto work on a number of A and B pics on Steadicam including Titantic, Jason Takes Manhattan, Terminator 2 and the last two of the X-Men films.

As for the content regarding Melting People. Street Trash explores the human body as a delicate and decaying canvas for horror. This approach would later be seen in Peter Jackson's (LOTR) Bad Taste, in Blade and House Of 1,000 Corpses. Street Trash has become a touchstone for fringe horror fans and film makers by setting the standard for "overboard" gore.


References:
IMDB, Street Trash (1987)

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