Okay, so like I’m eaten alive by the Blob, right? Well, no. If only it were that easy. There’s another movie in the chain of gross girl germs that unsettled my young brain stem when it comes to female power archetypes. It’s an old movie known as The Green Slime. It’s a science fiction movie where an asteroid is hurtling towards Earth on a collision course. Of course, that means bad news, so the space men and women of the international space station of action and adventure send a rocket to the asteroid to set a bunch of atomic charges and blow the space rock sky high before it hits the Earth. The space people accomplish their task, but when they return to the space station, their boots are covered in a green slime they picked up on the asteroid.

The space suit cleaners blast the suits with “germ killing energy”, except this slime absorbs energy and grows into two-tentacled, one-eyed monsters that kill through electrocution by touching you. The more energy the creatures absorb, the more they multiply. Pretty soon, the creatures start to slowly take over the space station and the crew fights a losing battle against them.

The creatures can be killed (by laser blasts from the laser guns the crew carry), but there are so many of them, that the crew is unable to do more than give ground and think of ways to slow them down. Eventually, the crew blow up the space station and escape in a rocket back to earth. But is this really “The End?” The green slime might have managed to get on the rocket, which the way the movie ends you can’t help but wonder.

This is another one of those movies that scared the pants off me. There’s a scene where a maintenance worker is trying to repair a circuit room that has lost power, back when the green slime creatures are only just starting to infest the station in individual incidents. It’s dark, and the guy is bumbling about, when this glowing eye opens. You know the dude is doomed. That scene where the eyeball opens has scarred me for life!

How did I get to here from the Blob? I let the free association carry me to the next line of thought, and I remembered this old movie. You didn’t want to touch these creatures, because they’d electrocute you and you’d turn into a crispy critter. Like the Blob, their presence grows greater with every scene, and they take over what up until now has been a nice, orderly male-dominated space game. It’s another of those “escape the onset of evil icky goo power” movies. Again, we have the invasion from outer space of a “monster slime”, and once more it’s up to the hetero-normal couple to work together to fight against the evil menace of nasty alien contamination.

This time the fear is not so much of being “eaten” by the Ultra-Feminine Uber Goop, but of being touched and losing control. It’s a development in terms of the psychological outlook behind this adventure yarn. The danger is more individualized (by the numerous collective tentacled creatures) and easier to deal with (gun phallic symbols actually work now), but the problem is unchanged. The transport vehicle (a tiny rock in The Blob, a tiny canister in Beware! The Blob, now an asteroid you can land a rocket on in The Green Slime) has grown in size, suggesting a more immediate impact problem. Green is the color of putrification, and of rot. It is also the color of spring growth. Things are growing and at the same time rotting away. There is change and transformation going on.

The movie has to present the typical fear of a feminine force “moving in” and draining all your energy away for it’s own purposes, taking over by means of gradual increase of numbers. The only solution is to “break up” by “exploding” the residence the encounter takes place in, also known as the space station of “the relationship”. But that only works until the next asteroid shows up. There seems to me to be another puzzle here, where the issues of the Blob were not resolved. Instead of “the present”, we are in a sci-fi “future world”, indicating this happens later along the line. The issues are the same, contact and inter-relation. But how do you relate to crazy green aliens with tentacles, coming toward you to give you the electric embrace of crispy death?

Okay, so the Blob relationship didn’t work. Here comes a new relationship, and things are similar, if not quite the same as before. It’s another go, as it were, and now you have to deal with more mature concepts (moving in, cooperative adaptation, boundaries – how much are you willing to put up with before you bogue out and call it even). One could look at it as simple case of infection, like a skin rash or athlete’s foot, to be treated with medicine as one would any non-intelligent (as far as we know) life force intruding upon our territory. Or one could imagine it as a wake-up call to learn a new lesson in relating to something important.

Obviously the unconscious thinks this is important enough to keep sending rocks-as-spaceships to establish contact. The problem is, the slime takes over everything, as a psychic infection is likely to do. It destroys personal relationships and wrecks the rules by which a society lives by. The ego has no choice but to enter a reactive state and try to preserve its fragility by retreat, stalling and in this case, scorched earth.

I say thee nay! I’m going right up to these green slime monsters and I’m bringing rubber gloves and boots. Shock me Amadeus.