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It may just be a gimmick, but the entertaining “Slime City” is a visual treat that will make you ignore the silly and purposeless plot.

This week’s recommendation is the exact type of film I had in mind when I initially started this column oh so many years ago.  Sure, at times I try to include indie gems, movies with meaning and “elevated horror” as per the latest Scream installment. But being honest, this column was created with the intent of putting on display the sleaziest and slimiest horror films available.

This week’s Tubi Tuesday is 1988’s Slime City — and it just might be the slimiest.

There are tons of ooey-gooey horror movies that were made from about the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, each of which seemingly tries to perfect the melting man SFX gimmick. The earliest film utilizing this extremely niche special effect tactic was 1977’s The Incredible Melting Man which was soon after perfected in The Evil Dead and The Fly. 

There were many films after Raimi’s classic that tried to recreate the magic of the final moments of that film, but they mostly just came off as absurd, examples being Dead Alive and Street Trash.

Finally, it seemed as if perhaps this niche trend died off with the advent of CGI. The final film with heavy usage of melting man SFX is seemingly 1994s aptly titled Body Melt. 

Slime City borrows from many of these films while remaining uniquely its own.

The film is much like The Incredible Melting Man as it follows an unfortunate soul who wakes to find himself melting after drinking a bizarre wine with his neighbor the night before.

In that the gooey transformation is triggered by ingesting a demonic alcoholic beverage, there are definitely parallels. But I assure you Slime City is a great deal saner and does not include a single penis or gratuitous rape scene.

In fact, the film is probably closer to Evil Dead than any of the other ooey-gooey films as it deals heavily in the occult, and the final scene uses a great deal of oatmeal and mustard for the penultimate slime scenes.

The details of the story are nearly irrelevant as that is not what the movie was made for.

Young Alex moves into his first apartment and is served wine made by an occult alchemist for the sole purpose of turning normal people into murderous, satanic slime monster people. But those are really just irrelevant details necessary to have some semblance of a story that meanders without rhyme or reason from one SFX-centric scene to the next.

Film as an art is much more than just a fancy pants director in a chair and a handsome leading man. There are a lot of people that work hard on creating this unique art, and sometimes it’s worth watching a film, not because of the fancy pants director or the attractive lead actress, but for the art department, make-up, and special effects.

These masters of their craft are on full display in this otherwise slimy movie, and that alone is enough to make me recommend you check out Slime City streaming for free on Tubi.

Overall Rating (Out of 5 Butterflies): 4

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