The Incredible Melting Man. by Phil Smith

Also, he seems to be craving human flesh. Like, for example, getting it to not drip off his body like hot candle wax. STCĪn astronaut named Steve West (why yes, that is the most astronaut-y name you’ve ever heard) returns from a trip to Saturn’s rings, only to find that…well, he’s a little trouble with his skin. Yet there’s an undeniable nihilistic charge to its central idea that contact with spectacular alien technology would make your average American more of a shithead, not less. Even the robots of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (on which the movie memorably appeared) have a hard time making it watchable. Image Credit: Irwin Yablans Co/Kobal/ShutterstĪ blond-haired teenager with zero charisma stumbles across a discarded alien weapon and necklace in the desert, using them to go on a mindlessly destructive rampage that transforms him into a monster. This is where the genre genuinely started to boldly go where it had never gone before. But each of these helped the decade redefine where science fiction could go on the big screen, whether it was in a grungy grindhouse or a state-of-the-art multiplex.

Some of them belong in the greatest-of-all-time canon others, we will fully admit, are the cinematic equivalent of a ripe Camembert. So, in honor of the 10-year-period that made science-fiction filmmaking what it is today, we are counting down the 50 best sci-fi movies of the 1970s. And the influences of this period are still showing up in theaters near you. umbrella and helped turn the genre into a gamechanger. But by the end of the 1970s, it was possible to have checked out postapocalyptic action-adventures, future-shock case studies, technophobic nightmares, low-budget exploitation movies about what-if scenarios and big-budget space operas - all of which fell under the S.F. As the Age of Aquarius slowly slid into the beginning of the nation’s Watergate-and-disco period, you could still find sci-fi movies that wanted to blow an audience’s possibly addled, probably enhanced mind. But the Seventies were particularly kind to one specific cul-de-sac of cinema: the science fiction film, a subset category that was still buzzing from its late-Sixties head-trip phase courtesy of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was the decade that gave the world the maverick New Hollywood drama, the Nixon-era paranoid thriller, the slasher flick, the all-star disaster movie, the gross-out comedy and the modern mega-blockbuster.

The Incredible Melting Man. by Phil Smith