Kevin Strange’s Top 6 Melt Movies


In honor of Calrton Mellick’s new novel BIO MELT (which you can pick up from Amazon right now!), I’ve decided to put together my top six favorite melt movies. The 80s and early 90s were THE decades for weird horror films, but while most people were watching slashers like Freddy and Jason carve up the silver screen, I was watching the weird home video shit. And one of my favorite genres was the melt movie. Lots of movies had meltdowns in that era. The Toxic Avenger, The Fly 2, and Robocop to name a few had some of the more memorable melting scenes. But a few movies took it upon themselves to theme the ENTIRE feature around melting. They’re all cool, but these six are my absolute favorites.

6. Bio CopBio-Cop-01

Bio-Cop is the reason this list is 6 movies instead of 5. While not actually a real movie, the mock trailer for Bio-Cop alone is brilliant enough to garner inclusion on this list. The story is, a beat cop has an accident in a lab, covering him in chemicals, turning him into a walking, talking slime monster. What makes this fake movie brilliant, is that ole Bio-Cop doesn’t take his transformation into a melt-man very well at all. Scene after scene in the trailer shows him deep in existential crisis. A poster for the film even has the tag line, “Why am I alive?”

 1373855248_75. Street Trash

Street Trash is a late 80s gem about a bunch of homeless people who get their hands on an alcoholic beverage called Viper. Problem is, when they drink it, they melt down into glorious technicolor puddles of goo. How this flick wasn’t produced by Troma is a mystery because it shares the same brash, low budget sleeze antics as Troma greats like The Toxic Avenger and Class of Nuke Em High. It also has one of the best posters in all of cult cinema.

TheStuffDVD4. The Stuff

The Stuff is a goofy, almost noir tale about an ex-FBI agent and a young boy trying to solve the mystery of a new yogurt-like food item on the market turning people into crazed, zombie addicts. The film runs long and doesn’t really focus too heavily on The Stuff in question on screen, but once it gets going there are some great melty goo shots that make this a definitive entry on my list of top melt flicks.

large_society_13_blu-ray_-e14320953701803. Society

Brian Yuzna of Empire Pictures fame brings us a rare non-Lovecraftian gem in his first feature film outing. Society is an allegory about wealthy secret societies. Unfortunately for our rich, young protagonist, this particular secret society is made up of hideous monsters with the ability to melt together and form ridiculously weird shapes out of their bodies. This flick is probably the most graphic of any of the entries on this list. Yuzna loves his slimy latex creatures, and the climax of Society might just be the coolest melt scene in cinema history.

Body_Melt_1993-Movie-72. Body Melt

Body Melt looks and feels a lot like Peter Jackson’s early works like Dead Alive and Bad Taste. That’s because this weird ass movie was also filmed in New Zealand. With its shoe string budget, wildly divergent story lines and absolutely wicked melt effects, Body Melt will keep your head spinning as you try to keep up with the plot, all while putting a huge smile on the face of any true melty movie fan. In essence, it’s the tale of a corporation monitoring the effects of a product on a small neighborhood totally unaware that they’re being watched. But that plot probably makes up less than half the run time of the movie. With hillbilly cannibals and all kinds of other crazy shit going on, Body Melt has something for every cult movie fanatic.

blob-19881. The Blob 1988

For me, The Blob 1988 is the holy grail of melt movies. Taking the basic premise of the original, a meteorite falls from space onto a small farm, only reveal a purple, translucent blob lurking inside hungry for human flesh. What the 88 version does is crank up the gore and slime FX to 11. There are so many awesome graphic, horrific shots of people suffering, melting and dying inside the blob. By the time the thing grows to the size of a building and decimates a small town during the film’s climax, any discerning melty movie fan should be howling with delight. This is the best of the bunch. The biggest budget melt movie of all time, I’d suspect. And it uses all of that money to gobble up and melt as many humans as possible during its run time. A true melt masterpiece.

3 thoughts on “Kevin Strange’s Top 6 Melt Movies

  1. Pingback: Kevin Strange’s Top 7 Toxic Waste Movies | KevinTheStrange.com

  2. 1. Blob 2. The Stuff 3. Society 4. Season 3 of Stranger Things 5. Street Trash 6. Body Melt 7. Bio Cop

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