I can never get over...


...the fact that so many people say this movie is so bad. As a kid who grew up in the 1970's and 80's,

I remember a great TV series called The Six Million Dollar Man about an astronaut who crashes in a military plane and is near death but the government steps in and gets his life saved with new, bionic body parts. He then does work for the Office of Scientific Investigation, fighting bad guys. My older brother remembers it better than I do in its day, but I saw it years ago on the SciFi (now SyFy) channel too.

Imagine- an astronaut- a really cool job in a really cool field, being a main character in anything! That alone is the start of a good premise, as seen in that show, I Dream of Jeanie, this movie and others and anything else there was. If you've ever seen Robinson Crusoe on Mars, that was a great movie too.

Speaking of my older brother, he helped me see just how cool that stuff is. He had space and astronaut pictures on the walls of his bedroom from National Geographic magazine, he had model rockets too. When the song Major Tom by Peter Schilling came out, we both loved that. He got me into ambient space music too, such as what is heard at the beginning and end of the song Dream Weaver by Gary Wright. There is much pure space music out there too.

I saw this movie and Robinson Crusoe on Mars on my old Detroit station from time to time. [Melting Man would especially turn up on the station's Creature Feature and Chiller Double Feature programs, which I watched all the time. So what also helps me likes this movie so much is that I've always been a huge horror and sci-fi buff. As bad as you might think this movie is, I dare you to watch another space one I saw back then too, called Invasion of the Star Creatures. Now THAT was a bad movie.

And come on! As a horror/sci-fi film, it rocks. This is the greatest one-off monster ever! Who in their right mind WOULDN'T be scared of a roaring, bloody mess of a guy coming at them? How creative is it to have guy with a mysterious condition that causes madness and melting? This was a new condition to the doctors and scientists, so they could only speculate anything about it. This condition also included an increase of strength (possibly just adrenaline) before increasing weakness starts setting in when the melting has gone far enough, then soon, death. The fact that they didn't explain all this in the film means nothing because it was a new, unexplainable condition and we were supposed to figure it out ourselves.

And the ending was brilliant, even if you find the trash can thing a little silly (and maybe it is in a way). BUT, this is the man's impending doom, for crying out loud, and someone has to clean up the mess! One of the things that's creepy to me is seeing someone's Impending doom becoming reality. Hearing the flashbacks of the radio transmissions made it all the cooler. I don't know if they were on his mind (his brain was probably goop anyway), but they contributed to this message: This man had a life, including an important career, but had a bad accident and gained a terrible medical condition. He tried to battle it at first and people tried to help him, but his last hope, Dr. Ted Nelson was killed. The deadly medical condition won out and claimed its first known victim. He will never know his normal life again, but peace, at last, is his.

I, being intelligent even as a kid, figured all this out back then. Yet many people today hold that lack of spoken explanation against the movie.

Even as an adult, when I can notice cheesy points and there were a few things that could have been written better in this film. Despite that, this movie is easy to lose yourself in and enjoy and get scared by if you don't go into it like a high and mighty know-it-all who needs to have every aspect of every movie make total sense and not the slightest bit cheesy to enjoy it and give it any praise. It's too bad that so many people get like that when they grow up. It's not maturing, but becoming nitpicking, want - everything - spelled - out - for - them, possibly attention-seeking know-it-alls who just want to come off as intelligent and "better people" than to give this "trash" any credit. Those people don't seem "cool" at all to me for what they do and they trash talk on nearly every board for horror movies more than 20 years old. That makes me think the reviewers are kids who are overly-saturated with crap like the Scream movies, the worst of the Jason movies (I say the last halfway good consecutive one was part 3), the I Know What You Did Last Summer movies and the Hostel movies. They don't "get" older, wiser ways of thinking and will only be creeped out by what they see played out by actors, not by great atmosphere or anything that would require thinking.

As much as I love MST3000 and the episode this movie was in along with the jokes, I think it's a shame it was in it. Since the show was for cheesy movies, it only encouraged more people to think (or just say) it was bad. This is one of the very best movies the show ever showed.

So come on, show that you are of at least average intelligence and give this movie a good rating, like it deserves.

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[deleted]

You, being intelligent as you say should watch some quality movies and come back and try to say how great this is with a straight face. As a mst3000 episode is was just quite average. The grandma scene. Come on. Atrocious.

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Considering it was on MST3K I'm surprised it's not rated even lower. A lot of the fans of that show automatically rate everything that was featured on it a 1.

Compared to stuff like Monster a Go-Go or the Coleman Francis trilogy, Incredible Melting Man is high quality. I rated it a 7/10.


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