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The Slime People (1963)

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,