Melting

What is with the 1960s and melting people? There is an overwhelming amount of horror movie scenes from the 1960s where people melt. (Note: In the following paragraphs there will be spoilers for The Wizard of Oz, Bloodlust, Othello, and The Terror)

The classic melting scene in The Wizard of Oz back in 1939 was wonderfully well done. These was smoke, shrieking, easily repeatable movie lines, and above all else it actually works for the story. When the 1960s rolled around they completely forgot about the idea of plausability.

The film Bloodlust (1961) is actually an interesting film. It's based off the short story The Most Dangerous Game. Of course instead of the irony of a hunter becoming the hunted, they attempted to draw the teenage crowds by making it a group of teenagers with a drunk boat captain instead. Still an interesting film. There is really only one scene in that movie that bothers the hell out of me. The teenagers are snooping around Mr. Rich Hunter Man's house and they come across the place where his sasquatch like servant taxidermies people. They end up in a scuffle with him and he gets thrust into the vat of boiling taxidermy liquid (I don't actually know that much about the taxidermy process). Sasquatch then flails around while his face melts. He falls back in the vat and pops up one last time to deliver his stunning line of gurbling. (It's vaguely like in Othello when Desdamonia pops back up and says she's been murdered after she was smothered to death.

The Terror (1963) on the other hand is just a random compilation. the beginning of the movie isn't so bad and it manages to be pretty interesting for most of the film. Then a character who never talks above a whisper for no explainable reason (my theory: the actor had larangitus) gets his eyes pecked out by a hawk, bleeds carrot juice, falls off a cliff, and then still manages to whisper a line to what you now realize to be a young Jack Nicholson. (What do you know another Desdamona type scene.) Once you recognize that Andre is played by Jack Nicholson things just start going down hill. (I'm not ragging on the actor at all, I'm just saying that we're so used to seeing him old we forget that he wasn't always that way.) After this "dramatic" death the plot still remains intreguing.

It's once we start learning what's actually going on that the movie starts to stink. We discover that the Barron is in fact the delusional lover of the ghost chick. That's when we also discover that the creepy lady controlling the ghost chick is actual the Barron's mother. (This might not be so bad if the actress playing the creepy lady wasn't 49 and the Barron wasn't 75.) Then the creepy lady gets struck by lightning and burns to death. Then there's a big dramatic scene with a crypt flooding while Ghost Girl tries to strangle the Barron. A wall bursts and the rocks (that look like wet paper) float. Then Jack Nicholson rescues the Ghost Chick and takes her outside where he kisses her and tells her she's free. She then melts like a candle. The film has some awesome camera shots and actors, but in the last ten minutes of the film, it starts pulling stuff out of it's ass. (Aparently it was largely shot on adlibs. This might be why the ending sucks.

Look what you started Wizard of Oz! You should be ashamed of yourself!