The Incredible Melting Man (1977) on Netflix
Two astronauts die near Saturn and a third, Colonel Steve West, comes home with his flesh melting away. He escapes the hospital; Dr. Ted Nelson and General Michael Perry hunt for him.
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- Netflix1.3/5
- IMDb4.3/105,767 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes8%
Trailer
Plot summary
A space flight to Saturn ends in a radiation blast that kills two of the three astronauts aboard and leaves Colonel Steve West badly injured. He wakes in a hospital on Earth with the flesh melting from his face and hands. In a panic he attacks a nurse and flees the building. Dr. Loring and Dr. Ted Nelson examine the nurse's corpse and detect weak radiation coming off it, which tells them West himself has turned radioactive. Nelson, a friend of West, decides that West has lost his mind and that only human flesh can slow the melting. He calls General Michael Perry, who knows about the accident, and the general agrees to help hunt for West.
Cast
- Alex Rebaras Steve West
- Stuart Edmond Rodgersas Little Boy
- Chris Witneyas Little Boy
- Dorothy Loveas Helen
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Incredible Melting Man (1977)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Gelfman and Rosenberg decided during shooting that a straight horror film would be more financially successful than a parody, so comedic scenes were edited out and new horror scenes shot and added. Sachs said the film was taken away from him and suffered because the producers tried to make it both a comedy and horror film.
- A poster claimed Rick Baker was "the new master of special effects" who had brought "the magic of The Exorcist", though Dick Smith was the makeup artist who primarily worked on that film. Exorcist director William Friedkin was so angry that he tore the poster down and ripped it to pieces.
- In RoboCop (1987), Emil Antonowsky (Paul McCrane) drives into a vat of toxic waste and his flesh melts off; special makeup effects artist Rob Bottin designed those effects, inspired by Baker's work, and dubbed them "the Melting Man" as a homage.
- The idea came to writer-director William Sachs when his mother, working in the office of a spray paint company, showed him the "gooey stuff" used as a basis for spray paint and jokingly suggested he should make a film featuring that material.
- For the scene where a murdered fisherman's severed head falls down a waterfall and smashes on the rocks, makeup artist Baker used a gelatin head with a wax skull and fake blood inside, which burst out upon impact.
- Baker designed four distinct stages of makeup so that West would appear to melt gradually, but after two separate stages of editing the stages were eliminated from the final cut, leaving the character looking generally the same throughout the film.
- Matt Maiellaro, co-creator of the Cartoon Network series Aqua Teen Hunger Force, said the film inspired him to start making films himself; he saw it at eight and knew horror movies "were going to be big religion in my life".
