Attack of the Slime City Monsters!

The original Slime City is the epitome of 1980s VHS low-budget cult horror trash. But even more shocking than the original movie is the fact that 22 years later, director Greg Lamberson decided to make a sequel! And it’s just as crappy (in a good way).

SLIME CITY (1988)

This nice chap named Alex moves into an apartment building and soon meets some of his neighbors, including an S&M leather rocker chick and a punk pretty boy. Curiously, he accepts an offer to have dinner with the punk dude, who is clearly into him.

Leave it to a gay to get an innocent straight dude drunk then convert him into some evil killing slime monster. That’s what happens when the punker shares some mysterious homemade liquor he got from a neighbor. But he still doesn’t get any sex.

Instead, Alex leaves the punker with blue balls, meets the leather chick on his way back upstairs, and has sex with her.

Before long, Alex turns into a puss-covered dripping zombie-like creature. His first victim is a homeless dude. But Alex turns right back to his normal self after killing the guy and doesn’t remember any of it. But soon, he is sliming out more often and needs to kill. And he wants to find out why. Poking around the apartment building uncovers a plot involving a cult, an occult book, the liquor, and sex! Wahoo!

It’s up to Alex’s girlfriend to save him. And there’s only one way to do that—kill him! As if there isn’t enough gooey gory death throughout the film, the final confrontation is cheap special effects gold! She hacks, slices, guts, dismembers, and mutilates the man she loves in what look like puddles of neon paint and messy foods, but he keeps coming back! The 80s were the best.

SLIME CITY MASSACRE (2010)

The sequel has a more polished look than the direct-to-video feel of the original film. Well, maybe not the opening scene of a city (and Lloyd Kaufman in a cameo on the street) getting a computer animation nuking, but the rest of the film.

Then we meet a young couple that has survived the aftermath. They come upon a derelict building and soon team up with scream queen Debbie Rochon and her man. The foursome makes a happy little home and finds a huge stock of liquor in the building. Uh-oh. You guessed it. FOUR slime monsters!

Slime City Massacre is a cautionary tale about being a homeless addict and it’s more bizzaro than the original. Debbie Rochon becomes a pool of slime that lives in a bathtub. There’s a sex ring living in the building and I’m pretty sure the first prostitute we see is a drag queen. And then some young men pass up on all the prostitutes and grab an old homeless dude for a blowjob—which is actually a ruse so that they can beat him up.

And this is where we see that the slime monsters come to the rescue and it seems they only knock off the lowest of the post-apocalyptic low. The gore and body count is better in the sequel, but the movie gets kind of chaotic as a result. A new group tries to infiltrate the place, so the slime monsters have to take them all down.

There’s also a series of flashbacks about the origins of the cult interspersed throughout the film, which also explains how the infamous liquor got into the building in the first place. I get that the director wanted to connect the two movies, but the backstory only manages to distract from the action of the main plot because it’s a whole plot of its own. Not to mention, the actor who played Alex in the first film appears as a main character in the flashbacks, but he’s not reprising his role as Alex!

Fans of Slime City will appreciate the end of the sequel. A character from the first movie (not Alex) is back to end the slime monster curse once and for all. This final segment is the only part that really captures the cheesy, campy humor of the time period from which the original film came. In fact, it’s a great homage to not only Slime City, but 80s cult films in general. Despite my love of 80s horror, I think I might like Slime City Massacre better than Slime City!