Geekscape’s Top-10 Characters Who Melted in Pop Culture!
As I have said in in previous articles I’ve written, I have seen hundreds, if not thousands, of simulated deaths in my life. I’ve seen drownings, suicides, countless shootings and stabbings. I’ve seen Patrick Swayze tear a guy’s throat out with his bare hands. I’ve seen people fall from high places. I’ve seen people get fed into giant spinning blades. I’ve seen heads explode. I’ve seen monsters swallow people whole. I’ve seen limbs get torn off. Have you ever noticed that when people lose a limb in cartoons, their innards always look like a ham? My point is: There are some weird, weird ways to die in movies.
But no death is weirder to me than melting. From what I know from my biology classes is that human flesh doesn’t melt. You can apply heat to them, but a person will cook like a steak, not dribble away like a candle. You can dump acid on someone, but they’ll lose their skin, not, technically, become a liquid. And yet melting is often tapped in films as a form of death, usually as a way to do in the bad guy. Melting is a dramatic – if not totally implausible – way to depict death, as it’s going to be visually striking, and it’s going to be particularly painful. It also leaves a wonderful gooey residue behind; no one’s going to evaporate immediately. We have to wonder over the puddle they have become.
So, in the interest of exploring yet another wonky aspect of film in my twisted, addled mind, I have come up with yet another wacky list for Geekscape. Read in wonderment, and perhaps I can make your own brain melt a little bit.
10) Richard Adams
in “Howling IV: The Original Nightmare” (1988)
This melting didn’t result in the character’s death, but was actually one of the more creative werewolf transformations I’ve seen. Michael T. Weiss from “The Pretender” plays the douchey, mullet-sporing boyfriend of our poor beleaguered heroine (Romy Windor) in the fourth “Howling” movie. As in the first “Howling”, the supporting boyfriend ends up getting seduced by a local hottie, and, as a result, becomes a werewolf. He, of course, goes through some of the usual signs that he might be supernatural: He heals really quickly, for one. He also becomes even more douchey. I guess you’re not allowed to be a polite werewolf. And, of course, on the next full moon, he turns all wolfy.
But Richard doesn’t just grow sideburns, get orange eyes and grow fangs, as most movie werewolves do. He actually melts. In a long, effects-heavy and gloriously disgusting scene, Richard begins to melt. The flesh runs down his face, his eye sockets droop, and channels of what looks like banana pudding pours down his face. His limbs drop off. His skeleton is eventually exposed, and that too melts. Once he’s been totally liquified, a goop-covered werewolf emerges from the puddle. This is a neat and original way to show a werewolf transformation, and is certainly the most notable thing in an otherwise unremarkable straight-to-video horror sequel from the ’80s.
9) Steve West
in “The Incredible Melting Man” (1977)
This one may be well-known to fans of “Mystery Science Theater 3000.” “The Incredible Melting Man” is a weird, weird and pretty damn bad movie about an astronaut, played by Alex Rebar, who goes into space, is infected by some alien cooties, and returns to Earth as a monster who wants to kill. What kind of monster? Sadly, not a hot topless energy vampire like in “Lifeforce,” but as a walking, melting pile of goop.
The melting effects aren’t really all that impressive, as it looks like a guy wearing a suit made of algae, coated in maple syrup. Also, how long can a man melt before he’s entirely melted away? Not very long is my guess. So, yeah, even the premise is stupid. But the premise actually becomes so implausible after a while, the melting man takes on a camp appeal, and becomes like a particularly gooey zombie who wants to drown you in his liquefying bodily fluids. I don’t want to drown in pus. It’s on the top-ten list of ways I don’t want to die.
Hm… That list may make its way to Geekscape eventually.
8) (TIE) The bums who drink Viper rum & the virus victims
in “Street Trash” (1987) and “Body Melt” (1993)
These two films also made it onto the Geekscape list of The Most Disgusting Films Ever Made, notably for their melting sequences. Something about goop, I suppose. The gooey, viscous mucous that coats monsters makes them more scary and more disgusting. Would the creatures in “Aliens” have been as scary or monstrous if they were always dry? No. They had to sweat to be scary. So when a person transforms into glop, it’s particularly stomach-churning. Few films had melting effects as good as Philip Brophy’s 1993 opus “Body Melt” and J. Michael Muro’s 1987 gross-out “Street Trash.”
In “Body Melt,” a virus is let loose into the populace of Australia, and the people who are unlucky enough to contract if find that their body parts comically swell, bits of them explode, and their entire bodies are reduced to puddles of so much melted ice cream. The tongue scene is pretty notorious, and, yes, there’s a scene where a guy’s penis grows and explodes. The plot makes little sense (why, for instance, is there a subplot about living with inbred hicks who eat kangaroo organs?), but the film was clearly mad as a set piece for melting effects. Hence the title.
“Street Trash” is just as shameless in its need to show off melting effects, but these melting scenes are even meltier, if that makes any sense. Colorful glop splays from homeless people as if they’re morphing into jam. They cough up opaque yellow liquid, which resembles nothing produced by the human body. What makes them melt? A diseased, or perhaps cursed, case of booze found in the wall of a liquor store. I’m tempted to call that a comment on how booze is playing a large role in the stunted potential of the homeless community, but I don’t think the director had that much on his mind. He just wanted the geek show. Watching a man turn into a purple smear in the inside of a toilet is a sight you won’t be able to un-see.
7) Judge Doom
in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” (1988)
I don’t think I’m giving too much away with this, as we’ve all seen “Roger Rabbit,” right? Well if you haven’t, go watch it right now (seriously, get off the computer and find the film), and then return to this spoiler. Back? Good. Judge Doom (Christopher Lloyd) is the villainous judge who would destroy all the beloved cartoon characters living in an L.A. slum in order to make room for a freeway. It’s revealed late in the film that he is also a cartoon himself who has lost his mind, and is hellbent on genocide and murder. That’s one seriously disturbed Toon.
Judge Doom had invented something that can kill cartoons during the course of the film. Cartoons, you see, can fall from cliffs, and stand up, dazed, and still alive. Judge Doom mixed together turpentine, acetate and benzine to create something called The Dip, which essentially melts cartoons back into ink. Yipe. By the film’s end, he gets his, though, as our heroes manage to coat him in a vat of the stuff, and he melts right inside the rubber human suit we was wearing. He melts into oblivion, shrieking all the while. A bad ending to a bad Toon.
6) Emil M. Antonowsky
in “RoboCop” (1987)
I perhaps saw this film at too early an age (as did you), and was appalled and terrified by the extreme violence (that, of course, didn’t stop me from watching it over and over again). We see a guy get his hand blown off right in front of us. We see bullets rip a man’s torso open. We see RoboCop punch a spike into a guy’s neck. Yeah, the mayhem tally is way high from this fun and rather witty 1987 action satire.
The lead bad guy had a crony in the film named Emil M. Antonowsky (Paul McCrane from “Fame”) who came about to one of the most memorable deaths in a film full of them. This guy, in a shootout at a nuclear power plant, way accidentally coated in a huge splash of green toxic waste. If there’s anything we’ve learned about toxic waste from movies, it’s that it mutates you, only sometimes for the better. Emil got it for the worse, as he merges as a lumpen, flesh encrusted mass of awfulness, still alive, and howling in pain. His skin didn’t melt off, but it did bulge and droop. But then he’s hit by a car, and he doesn’t merely get knocked over, he bursts like a waterballoon. Ack! The toxic waste, I’m guessing, was liquefying him on the inside. That guy would have melted if the car didn’t squish the goop out of him first. Awesome melting scene.
5) Frosty the Snowman
from the 1950 Gene Autry song
It’s Christmastime, and surely you’ve heard some horrible cover of this song already, in some shop or on the radio. Everyone knows this song. It’s one of those songs they sing to you in school when you’re little. It’s a charming magical song about an ordinary snowman who comes to life thanks to the spell in a magical hat. Frosty dances and sings and plays with the local children, before “going on his way,” alluding, of course, to his inevitable melting. Snowmen, after all, don'[t make it so well in the spring.
It didn’t take a very sophisticated kid to see the dark side of this tale. Frosty is a magical ice nymph whose life must, necessarily, be ephemeral. By coming to life, his death is now imminent (which you could, if you were a depressive Goth type, use as a Plath-like metaphor for all life). It was sad to see your favorite ice monster die horribly. He promises to be back, though. There are plenty of horror parallels that have been drawn from that promise. Here’s a lighthearted, kind of corny 1950s folk hit with tinges of fear throughout. Thanks Gene. You scared generations of kids.
4) The T-1000
from “Terminator 2” (1991)
This killer robot from the future is one of the only characters on this list who can melt, but also resolidify. James Camera, back in the early 1990s, used the then-nascent CGI technologies to create one of the mot visually striking and memorable villains in film history by making a super robot that could turn into liquid metal at will, and reform in any solid shape. Damn, that’s awesome. The effects that were used to achieve this still look amazing today, and are still wicked cool. There’s a scene where the T-1000 disguises itself as a floor panel, and then sort of melts in reverse to stand up and attack someone from behind. Meltiness is turned on its ear, and becomes a sort of superpower.
He also melts as a weakness. Since our heroes find that bullets, freezing, explosives and fires don’t really harm a being made of liquid metal, they must, ultimately, melt him even more in a vat of molten steel. This is double melting for your money. A liquid being turned into liquid. It boggles the mind.
3) The Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man
in “Ghostbusters” (1984)
Think of the most harmless thing you can. Mr. Stay-Puft, right? The innocuous marshmallow mascot from the package. How can such a thing be your destructor? Well, if an evil demon is imploring that you choose the mode of your death, and you accidentally think of a marshmallow man, well, that man is going to be hyundreds of feet tall. All made of magical living marshmallow. I wonder if enough people leaped on him and started chewing away, if they’d eventually eat the entire being. Or if he’d eventually stop moving at some point. These are the important questions that keep me up at night.
Eventually our resolute ghostbusting heroes use their nuclear-powered proton packs (and a resulting supernatural explosion) to melt the marshmallow man, creating a vast white flood of goopy candy covering New York City. Striking, gross, and probably tasty, this is melting on a massive scale. How often to villains melt? Only sometimes. But how often have they also flooded the immediate area? Rarely. Well, maybe that one time in “X-Men,” when Bruce Davison turned into water.
2) Major Arnold Toht
in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”
Yeah, so this happened:
1) The Wicked Witch of the West
in “The Wizard of Oz” (1939)
The gold standard for all meltings has got to be the time Margaret Hamilton, playing the green-skinned Wicked Witch of the West in “The Wizard of Oz” oozed into a puddle. This scene in particularly tragic, as we get to hear her screaming and complaining as he’s facing her inevitable mortality. I’m going. Going. Hearing he final whimpering cries as she sinks into the floor made me horrified, and actually had me a little sad for the woman. It also was a disturbing scene which children of several generations have seen time and again. John Waters has said that the scene was a defining moment of his childhood, and one of the first things that brought him to movies to begin with. I can see why.
And what made the Witch melt? Nothing so scary as a bucket of water. A splash on the face, and she melts like sugar. I’m guessing that a being who would melt next to water would be wiser than to have random buckets of the stuff laying around. But never mind. Dorothy douses her, and down she goes. It’s like when people fill squirtguns with holy water to spray vampires; there’s something a bit too practical about it. But melt she must. I suppose the filmmakers thought it would be a good way to kill the villain without any real violence. It’s still strange and a might scary.
Everyone has seen it, and everyone loves it.
Witney Seibold is a semi-fluid amorphous mass living in Los Angeles. The mass encourages you to visit the following sites for more of its insightful reviews. It takes part in:
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