It seemed like a fairly simple plot when the movie started rolling: Alex is searching for a new apartment with his girlfriend Lori. Surprisingly, Alex hits paydirt and finds a nifty (though occupied by a few scary tenants) apartment for cheap… Almost too cheap! The tenants seem to be a friendly bunch; the dominatrix prostitute across the hallway is particularly friendly and the art school poet next door is quick to ask Alex over for dinner. Alex feels at-home enough to invite Lori to move in with him… Then things start getting a little strange.

In the middle of a particularly warm night, Alex awakes to find his body covered in slime. Figuring it might be too excessive to be the result of a wet dream, Alex leaves the apartment and loses control of his body, resulting in the death of a hobo. Surprisingly, the hobo’s demise causes Alex to revert back to normal. Rushing back home, Alex meets up with his poet neighbor, who brings tidings of good cheer in the form of boxes containing Himalayan yogurt and wine made by a diabolical alchemist and cult leader named Zachary. Incidentally, Zachary happened to take his neighbors with him when he felt it was time to give himself over to the dark side.

Apparently “suicide cult” isn’t enough to throw Alex off of his appetite for the stuff, and he bolts down a container full of the green muck (the yogurt) in rapturous glee. Soon enough, Alex is avoiding Lori and spending his days and nights eating the apartment’s supply of delicious goo, which gives Lori the opportunity to consult with a palm reader to find out just what the hell is going on over at her boyfriend’s place.

And just what the hell is wrong with Alex? He’s taken to wrapping himself up in gauze just to keep his melting face together when he can’t find a nearby hooker to satisfy his murderous needs. Are Alex’s transformations just hallucinations? The bagged body parts that are piling up in the garbage cans certainly suggest they’re not. The plot starts becoming more complicated when it’s revealed the tenants are actually just host bodies for the resurrected cult, and Alex is being pegged for the resurrection of Zachary. Soon enough, it’s Lori to the rescue in an ending that had me wincing and giggling in surprise due to how downright excessive and surreal it was.

Sort of working as a companion piece with Street Trash (in fact, the director of Street Trash did some camera work for this film), Slime City takes the idea of gooey, exploding bodies and puts its own creative spin on the subject. The concept starts off fairly simple, but takes a quick leap into some rather odd plotlines. One of the better handled points is the questioning of whether or not Alex’s experiences were hallucinatory or not. The filmmakers make sure that Alex’s victims never make note of his oozing condition. Sadly, the film blows the situation halfway through the movie and finally has a character acknowledging his situation, which might make the film slightly less intriguing, but doesn’t stop the film from being fun.

Then again, who comes to a movie called Slime City looking for a coherent story with likeable characters? It’s all about the slime, and in that regard, the movie certainly doesn’t fail. Hell even the characters come off as generally gritty and slimy; my general reaction to them being “Wow, every single character in this movie looks like they listen to The Cramps a lot.”

The special effects range in quality. I’m sure a great deal of the budget went specifically into the slime and building of dummies. Once the guts start splattering, the filmmakers choose to use such ingredients as sausages and scrambled eggs; which make you ask yourself, “Hey, are those sausages and eggs?” when you see them onscreen. It might not be as mature and interesting as Street Trash, but I recommend it, at least for the fantastic ending.

If there’s one thing to complain about, it’s that the film has been tinkered with, and is not the original presentation. As mentioned in the liner notes, Lambert did a re-edit of the film in 1999 for a VHS release. Some cuts he felt were justified, some were not. So for the DVD release, Lamberson went back and re-instated a few of the cut scenes he felt were needed in the film. A director fiddling with his films is okay by me, as long as he releases what he feels to be the best overall product. But it certainly would be nice to have a full, uncut version of the film… or at the very least, the edited footage in a ‘deleted scenes’ section of the disc.

Video 
The good news is that Slime City has finally been released in Anamorphic Widescreen. Lamberson had intentionally shot the film for a 35mm blow-up and thus left an awful lot of extra head and legroom, but when the blow-up never occurred, the film retained its 1.33:1 presentation, which caused the director much embarrassment. Thanks to Shock-O-Rama, a proper matte was applied and now the film can be seen in its original intended aspect ratio.

There is a bit of dirt still remaining on the print, along with an instance or two where parts of the image are wiped out. These don’t pop up enough to cause much pain and anger, at least. Otherwise, it’s what you would expect: a bit dull and fuzzy, though the colors seem fairly accurate, and are quite vivid once the guts start flowing.

Audio
Fairing worse than the video quality, the stereo soundtrack sounds consistently muffled. You’re going to have to hit the volume button to make sense out of anything, and you’re going to have to make an effort to understand anyone since no subtitles have been provided.

Extras 
We start off with the Audio Commentary, which features director Gregory Lamberson and actor Robert Sabin. The commentary is fun and informative, but suffers because there’s an odd echo effect placed on the background film audio. Sometimes it creates a jumble of noise, but for the most part, the commentary itself is audible. Also late in the film, the commentary desynchs from what’s going on in the film itself, and is about 30 seconds ahead of what’s happening onscreen.

Under the DVD extras section, we have a seven-minute mini-documentary about the making of Slime City, which contains a nice collection of behind-the-scenes footage, archival photos, and even footage from Lambert’s student films.

This might seem a little barebones, but the most interesting DVD extra included is the full-length film Lamberson directed in 1999 called Naked Fear. Pretty much restricted to midnight showings in New York and never appearing on home video until now, Naked Fear is a story about Camden (played by Slime City’s Robert Sabin), an agoraphobic who hasn’t left his apartment in over 10 years. To try to make himself a more sociable person, he allows Randy (Tommy Sweeny from Lamberson’s Undying Love), an admitted claustrophobic, to move into his apartment. The two get along just fine until Randy is forced to kill an intruder. What seems like an act of self-defense is later revealed to be the actions of a serial killer, and Camden is faced with the situation of having to deal with having a psychotic serial killer as a best friend.

Despite its low budget (the movie was shot on Hi 8 Video), the technical aspects of the film are impressive (Lamberson thinks it’s his best film). It is quite a fun little feature that concentrates more on the personalities than on the blood. In fact, I was so caught up in the characters that I was kind of shocked once the blood started to flow (bonus points for the darkly comedic shot of the blood splattering all over a used condom during a scene where a prostitute gets killed).

Naked Fear is one of the better shot-on-video affairs I’ve seen, and I’m surprised it shows up simply under the special features, rather than giving it double-billing on the DVD.

Even though Naked Fear is just considered an extra on the disc, it even has its own special features in the form of another commentary track. Lamberson and Sabin are back, but this time Tommy Sweeny joins in for a fairly energetic talk. Thankfully the sound problems on the Slime City commentary are not present on this track.

On the self-promotional side of things, Shock-O-Rama: A Year of Shocks looks into Shock-O-Rama’s latest releases. Let’s just say that it reminded me of the old Full Moon Video promos that ran at the end of every tape they put out. Whether this is good or bad is up to you.

Finally there’s a set of trailers for Satan’s Black Wedding, Criminally Insane, Slime City (which seems to be a newly created trailer, but I’m only basing that assumption on the cartoon goo graphics), and Women’s Prison Massacre.

Parting Thoughts
One might not have the highest expectations when watching a movie called Slime City, but it turns out the film has a lot more going for it than you’d initially think. It gives you exactly what you would expect, and a little extra to keep you actually interested. Combined with the surprisingly good Naked Fear, Slime City is a solid disc that won’t turn to mush if you feed it liquor and yogurt.