User reviews

Plot

After Los Angeles is invaded by an army of subterranean monsters, a small group of people must fight for survival in the deserted metropolis.

Cast

Not familiar with anyone involved. Judee Morton however was the standout performer, though the competition wasn't exactly steep.

Verdict

When you go into a 60's B movie like this you must lower your expectations to crippling levels. You must be aware it was a different time and take these things into consideration. Alas even doing so The Slime People is weak stock and fails on most levels.

The cast are hokey, the creatures look horrendous, the plot is riddled with holes and nonsensical moments and though I don't think it's quite as bad as most here are making out I can't dispute that this is a very poor excuse of a science fiction flick even for it's time.

Rants

Is it wrong that I expected so much for from the slime people themselves? I expected, you know.....slime people. Creatures made of slime, not these.....I don't even know what they are. Outside of a bit of slime around the mouth (Which was probably drool, it was black and white after all) these weren't slimey in the slightest. So few actual slime monsters in movies, I don't know why this bothers me so much but it does #sad #moreslimepeopleplease

The Good

Has a slight charm Judee Morton

The Bad

Poor acting Dreadful "Fight" scenes Plot is awful Creatures are shoddy.

No, this is not the story of a bunch of McDonald's fry cooks. Nor is it the biography of my ex-bosses at a certain midtown NY ad agency. What "The Slime People" turns out to be is an extremely shoddily put together film depicting what happens when a race of lumbering, bipedal reptilians attacks L.A. from underground and erects a dome of fog around it. The "director," '40s star Robert Hutton, is also the action lead here, looking for all the world like a dressed-down Dan Hicks. His thesping is passable, but the small band that he falls in with emotes terribly...especially the two women. I don't think I've EVER seen worse acting. This film, although it lasts a mere 65 minutes, is guaranteed to induce a headache, (a) because the sound quality of this Rhino DVD is so lousy, and (b) because most of the film takes place in a dark, misty fog. Nothing seems to make any sense; the characters' actions and what they say all leave the viewer shaking his/her head in bafflement. Other than the admittedly cool-looking monsters (which, to the film's credit, we DO get to see in the opening seconds), the FX are god-awful. The machine that the Slime People are using to erect that impenetrable fog dome looks just like a wiggly Hefty garbage bag, and is as easily disposed of! All in all, "The Slime People" gives "Robot Monster" some competition as one of the worst films of all time. Don't miss it?

"The Slime People" is not a good film and I won't shy away from that. But for an extremely low budgeted horror film with crappy looking monsters, there are worse...such as "Robot Monster" or "From Hell It Came".

The story begins with a man landing his small airplane at a California airport and noticing that there is no one there...no one. Soon he is met by a professor and his daughters and learns that some weird monsters have come out of the earth and are attacking mankind. That really is the entire plot!

All in all, this is a bad film with bad dialog and REALLY annoying female characters who cry and scream A LOT. But it's not bad as a time-passer...or something to laugh at as you watch.

Far from being a cinema classic, or even a classic of low-budget films, The Slime People still has a kind of charm that makes you want to stay with it until the end. Cheap sets and costumes, and pretty bad acting, make this one mostly forgettable, though the plot really isn't too bad. With a bigger budget and some better actors this might have been come off as a classic. Worth watching on a rainy Sunday afternoon if nothing else is on.

The Slime People would only appeal to the hard core lover of early science fiction movies. The over extensive use of the fog machine makes it difficult to see some of the scenes clearly enough to follow the action. The traditional wholesome characters (50's style, men at table discussing important things, woman putting away the dishes) engaging in supposedly serious discussions/explanations of the Slime folks "wall of fog" is just plain funny. But when all is said and done the movie did entertain me, but certainly not for everyone. Hats off to the actress stuck playing Bonnie, the dumb blonde teenager.

THE SLIME PEOPLE is an extremely low budget monster flick that has very little to recommend it, even for huge fans of this genre. For the most part this is talky and dull, charting the lives of a group of survivors who are hiding out in the mountains after the titular foes have taken over their city by lowering the temperature and filling the place with fog. There's a lot of back and forth argument and descriptions of places and events we never get to see, before things finally kick into gear with a low budget attack sequence right at the climax. To be fair, the creature costumes aren't all that bad, but it takes far too long to get to that point.

I really enjoy this genre (sci-fy/horror B-graders) but I will have to say this one is pretty much void of any value even to the most tolerant of bad movies.

On the other hand, I have watched it more than once and I'm not sure why. Maybe the buxom, blonde little flirt stirs some primeval attraction in my loins. Maybe the shambling slimeball monsters work for me in some way. Maybe there's a so-bad-it's-good quality to it. I really don't know.

In any case, I can't really recommend anyone shell out any money for it unless it's included in some collection of equally bad films. But who knows, maybe someone else can develop a little misunderstood affection for it as well.

The salt water cousins of the Creature from the Black Lagoon have come up in big numbers out of the sewers of Los Angeles and have set up shop. The human race has retreated out of the city as the Slime People have taken over and probably now have plans to acquire new turf.

To protect they're new neighborhood, The Slime People have lowered the mean temperature of Los Angeles to make it cooler for their needs. And of course they've enveloped the big Orange with a thick fog which only Robert Hutton flying a small private plane manages to penetrate. When he arrives he fines LA almost deserted.

Along the way he picks up scientist Robert Burton and his two lovely curvaceous daughters Susan Hart and Judee Morton, a stranded young Marine William Boyce and crazy eccentric writer Les Tremayne. It's up to these intrepid six to defeat The Slime People.

It's really only five of them because Tremayne's quite drunk, quite iconoclastic and quite useless. Tremayne, possessor of a fabulous voice that was his fortune as a radio actor, knows what an absolute turkey he's in and just overacts outrageously. Good thing his scenes were mostly outdoor because he'd be accused of digesting the entire set.

The slime people when you can see them through the fog look a whole lot like the Silurian monsters from the Doctor Who show who made their debut in the Jon Pertwee years. The fog which is a great gimmick for noir films also covers up a lot of the cheapness of production. In fact other than the monster costumes, I'm not sure what special expenses were entailed in making The Slime People. The film looks like it was shot with a Kodak Brownie camera.

You have to wonder when folks like Robert Hutton, Robert Burton and Les Tremayne do something like this, wasn't their anything else better out there. And if this was the best they were offered, YOIKES.

This yet another film I saw as a teenager in the 1960's that brings back many fond memories of my youth. I would have to agree that for all its awfulness "The Slime People" as one reviewer states, does have its charm. The excessive use of fog provides the movie with a unique atmosphere giving it just enough of an edge to make the film interesting and at times even a little scary. Every now and then one of the Slime People would sneak out of the fog and really creep us out. In some places the film is funny to the point of being ridiculous, still I think the story and the science behind it is plausible and it does have its serious moments. I have seen movies that were far worse than this one. If you love the films of this genre, just out of curiosity you should give it a look. The Slime People is very hard to find on TV, Satellite or Cable. I bought my VHS copy new a few years back. Even with the current digital re-mastering to DVD, this film will never be easy to watch.……..must be that all that fog…………….

755 Tango was warned not to land in LA (That is Los Angeles, not Louisiana). But does he head the warning? Of course not. He tries to use some strange device I think they called a phone booth, to no avail.

Soon we learn of some people with faces that only a mother can love. By the way, they were here first. Now a professor and his two cute daughters along with a reporter and a fine example of a U. S. soldier (not the British type that you dip into a soft-boiled egg) have to find their way out of the walled city (LA) before becoming victims.

The wall is made from a fog. Fog get me not. Will they learn how to penetrate this wall and will they be skilled enough to carry out their daring plan? Will love complicate things? Will Bonnie lose her hair? Can we stand to watch this with a straight face? Is it possible to refrain from kibitzing?

Is it male chauvinism that the "men" carry the guns and the "girls" carry the buckets?

When I first saw this film a long, long time ago, I was terrified and the film earned a special place in my heart. It was what I couldn't see that terrified me, of course, what was actually impossible to see for most of the time. The slime people didn't scare me, of course, because I didn't believe in them, I didn't buy their good looks.

When I saw the film again recently, I wasn't terrified, but I found its first half hour effective because the fog surrounding Los Angeles was so damn thick it evoked Stephen King's "The Mist" and James Herbert's "The Fog", two of my favorite stories. I have always loved fog and what it potentially harbors, so "The Slime People" still kept its special place in my heart.

The fog is UNBELIEVABLY thick in this Z-grade gem. No, it's more like hovering pea soup than fog. Clearly, it is papering over the non-existent sets and MIA production design, but it works. It convinces us that something terrible is lurking within it. When that "something" is revealed", the seams start to split.

The endless dialog scenes are something to behold. They don't go anywhere and the actors only convince us that they showed up to the studio to put food on the table. The monsters are rubbery, which is fine, but they lack personality, too, which is a great shame.

I like the fact that the monsters are still referred to as "people" in the title because monsters do deserve respect. It's just a pity they weren't given more do and it's equally pitiful that we don't get a look-in on their grand plan for LA and the world.

Since remakes should be improvements on bad films with potentially rich concepts, this is a prime candidate for one.

True schlock classic, so bad it's ridiculous from first frame to last. The eponymous people of the title are gorilla suits covered in rubber scales with fishy faces and coneheads, flushed from the sewers by-- what else?-- radiation, favorite threat of the Cold War. The endlessly convoluted "science" that explains it all is egregiously fictive, and the costumes cost half the production budget, so you can imagine the rest. Sister Susan Galbraith (Judee Morton) seems to regard the whole disaster as a fun adventure, and her father, Professor Galbraith (Robert Burton), who seems to have had the best grasp of the situation theretofore, apparently suffers a lapse of reason when he permits her to unnecessarily accompany her impetuous boyfriend (William Boyce) on a dangerous supply run with a casual "Take good care of her, son.", but maybe it's because sonny was, as he has stated, a marine, and such a background makes him best qualified to do battle with prehistoric monsters. Susan Hart as Lisa, the remaining Galbraith, was hired on the spot at the casting call, without benefit of an audition, solely for her beauty, and it shows In addition, she was given $35 to buy her own wardrobe with hopes that she would be able to dress herself up to be even more beautiful. I can't imagine anyone finding the wherewithal for romance under the circumstances, but in d grade horror, there's always time, not much, but always enough to stop the action momentarily for a brief, passionate smooch. And there's a classic jazzy horror score that isn't even credited.

The fun never ends.

If ever a movie served as an object lesson that film is a visual medium and must be treated as such, this is the one. It begins with a series of spoken news reports about the arrival of subterranean monsters in L.A. Since four of the five main characters in the story have lived through these events, there should be no reason to gather them together to screen news items about the monsters, but it kills a few minutes of running time, so... The characters then spend several minutes talking, followed by several minutes of driving. The viewer begins to wonder whether this creature feature will ever feature any actual creatures. In fact, the early part of the movie feels like a radio play, with the actors being filmed as they give their lines. And the dialogue bits go on seemingly forever.

Once the (minimal) action gets going, the thick fog (created by the monsters to cool L.A.'s hot climate and make it livable) obscures much of what is going on. The fog is obviously intended to cover up the movie's cheap production values, but mostly it just makes everything even harder to watch. The visual style has evolved from casual minimalism to ocular strain inducing. Not that blowing aside the fog would have made it much better. Every aspect of the movie comes off as shoddy in the lowest sense. The plot was poorly thought out and the action poorly staged. Little that happens moves the story ahead, makes any logical sense or generates interest. The average student film shows more evidence of thought and planning. The characters are unappealingly dull, and most of their interactions seem pointless and go nowhere. The locations add nothing of interest. The lighting, editing and camera direction seem outright amateurish, about on the level of a locally made infomercial. What little budget existed went toward the creature costumes. These are mildly imaginative, but not very scary.

As entertainment, even bad entertainment, absolutely nothing gets achieved here. There are not even any unintentional laughs. All a viewer can expect to get out of this movie is a mild case of eye strain and an appreciation for the cinematic lavishness of The Blair Witch Project.

This movie is so bad it will make your eyes bleed.You could better spend 76 minutes giving the cat a bath or waxing the family dog.Truly this is putrid cinema exemplified.

To be mercifully short on the plot:Slimy varmints from the bowels of the earth have encased L.A. in a solid wall of fog to establish their new home.(Why in heaven's name would anything want to encase Los Angeles and move in? La Jolla or some place in Orange county would be much more desirable!)These varmints are impervious to bullets as they are self sealing. Anyway it falls to 5 people to do what the armed forces couldn't do: liberate L.A. and defeat the monsters.

The fatal flaws in this film are abundant.Robert Hutton directed this probably because no one else wanted to risk their career.While Hutton and the 2 other "older" actors do a competent job the three youngsters are terrible. The actor portraying the Marine is painful to watch. The rubber suited monsters evoke howls of laughter. They look more like walking carp than inner earth denizens.

This movie truly is from the bowels of the earth.Giving it a 1 only because we can't give negative numbers.

1962's "The Slime People" was an independent effort, the only film directed by actor Robert Hutton, on a budget so low that he required the use of his father-in-law's butcher shop as a prime shooting location. He also stars as sportscaster Tom Gregory, barely managing to land his small craft at a deserted Los Angeles airport, where he meets up with Prof. Galbraith (Robert Burton) and his two daughters, Lisa (Susan Hart) and Bonnie (Judee Morton), taking a leisurely drive to the local TV station where Tom works, learning how the city has been evacuated after being overrun by subterranean invaders covered in scales and slime. A single reel of reports fills in both Tom and the audience about the situation, the impenetrable fog forming an unseen dome over the city that keeps out the military, these prehistoric creatures working to drop the temperature to an acceptable level to allow them to live on the surface. The old professor theorizes that atomic testing has driven them from below to conquer those above ground, killing opponents with spears and impervious to harm by their self healing armor. The group pick up a stranded Marine (William Boyce) and a self important writer (Les Tremayne) on their way to the local butcher shop, where the writer meets his doom before he can put anything down on paper. The wild deduction that salt water allowed Gregory to get through by proximity to sea water goes nowhere, eventually they set out to destroy the machine responsible for creating the dome, the Slime People only killed by their own spears in opening a wound through which their guts can spill out. The first half is at least tolerable, while the second proves a chore with the fog hiding more than the chintzy production values, giving willing audiences a headache trying to make out the on screen action. No tension is developed since the monsters are easily dispatched in every one on one encounter, three costumes made that supposedly took up more than half the (approximate) $56,000 budget (1954's "Target Earth" managed only one measly robot to represent their massive invasion). The gurgling monsters look fairly impressive at first glance, but as they only manage to claim Les Tremayne (in and out after 15 minutes) the characters have little trouble evading them, even rescuing Lisa from a fate worse than death when she is carelessly captured. Hutton was never the most expressive of actors and can't overcome the deficiencies in both script and budget, while prolific TV veteran Robert Burton died of cancer long before its release, a veteran of science fiction efforts "I Was a Teenage Frankenstein" and "Invasion of the Animal People." The normally excellent Tremayne makes a poor first impression holding a goat, making one wonder how his extended cameo came about (a veteran of "The Angry Red Planet," from which they also raided the music score), producer Joseph F. Robertson scripting with wife Blair, soon to do its slightly better cofeature with an equally outlandish premise, "The Crawling Hand."

This is a case where they had a pretty good idea for a B horror film, it just came 20 to 25 years too early. Imagine, a movie filled with slime monsters in the 80's! I see gore, I see awesome kills and I see slime on hot attractive women! It would be a sleazy film to be sure, but it would have a cult following and be considered a guilty pleasure. This one, unfortunately, was just a bit to boring. Bland monsters, where they did not seem to know what they were going for, bad effects and lots of conjecture scenes. Basically, if you gave this same film to Roger Corman in the 80's you would have had the perfect in nasty horror cinema. Instead, you get a film where you see they had an interesting story, but they just could not have the effects or the fast story to make the film itself all that interesting.

The story has a pilot over LA, he lands despite warnings suggesting he divert from his current trajectory. He encounters an empty airport; however, a car with a scientist and his two attractive daughters pulls up and tells him to get in. The pilot soon learns the city is under siege from terrible creatures that live underground. These slime people (what they are dubbed) have created a slime dome over the city and are turning the atmosphere into one of their liking. They also randomly kill the people still entrapped within the city with spears. So yes, creatures that can create a device to change the climate are still using spears. The group encounter a marine and the group soon tries to find a way to break the slime dome and stop the terrible slime people once and for all!

Like I said, make this film in the 80's and it probably would have been still bad, but a really fun bad. With the way it is presented in 1963, though, it seems like a bunch of other films of that era. A lot of promise, undercut by the limits in technology and the inability to show a bit of skin. I saw this film on an episode of MST3K and it was not a particularly strong episode, but it is not really the movie's fault as this film was featured during the first season of MST3K and that season is their weakest in my opinion. So, if you see the film, just be prepared to think to yourself how much potential the plot had...if only.

"The Slime People" is the typical sci-fi flick from the early '60s that could have gotten shown on "Mystery Science Theater 3000". In this case, a species of creatures coat Los Angeles in a strange mist and take over, while a few people hold out.

Yes, it's basically a B minus movie. Had they waited at least ten years to make it, it would have shown people violating the rules that "Scream" laid out about horror movie survival. As it is, the line "I'd like to see more of you" is up for some cool misinterpretation! So, this movie is nothing special, but fun to watch. A modern tag-line could be: THERE'S SOMETHING BAD IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD...AND THIS TIME, YOU CAN'T CALL THE GHOSTBUSTERS!