The story has almost noting to do with slime, and there is exactly one reference to anything coming out of a faucet. “Slime” doesn’t deliver, and it doesn’t need to. There isn’t even any acknowledgement as to who created this timeless piece of art on the cover, it was probably drawn late at night in the height of a toluene binge by the same Guild Press employee that decided to make the first three pages practically identical, blank, with only the title “Slime” in that slimy/dripping-looking font from the cover. Hell, the cover is so unbelievably cheesy, I doubt they took the time to read that juicy sales slogan. Who the hell has heard of Guild Press? I can tell you exactly how the copy I own ended up at the local resale shop however some bumbling nimrod like myself saw this fantastic cover and read the tagline “Turn on the faucet….and die of terror!” and was instantly sold. One look at the cover, and you know you’re dealing with something scraped grudgingly from the bottom of the barrel over at Guild Press. This is not to say that Slime is awesome. For anyone out there who has ever partaken in the luxury of killing off a pack of smokes and a twelve-pack while reading completely disposable literary trash in the vein of the Zebra releases or watching some obscure (for good reason) film by AIP Studios, well my friend, get your ass to and throw “Slime” at the top of your wish list and pray someone is selling a used copy. It was during this time that outcast publisher Zebra and I crossed paths. An enthusiastic 'Hell no!' is the correct answer. Can you really ever go wrong with ‘Rebel High’, ‘Arena’, ‘Split’, ‘Dolls’, ‘Street Trash’, or ‘Story of Ricky’. The gems in the rough however, a completely different story films that truly destroy all opposition and lay down the law, kicking ass and remaining films I either still cherish to this day and would pay at least 20 bucks for a copy of. As anyone who has tried asserting their own individual tastes in this manner can attest, about 95% of everything that we checked out was complete garbage.

During these excursions, we’d rent anything that we’d never heard of, the cheesier the better, even purveyors of pure trash like TNT or USA wouldn’t touch these films with a ten foot pole. We can call these the formative years of whatever degree of ‘indie’ phase I might have gone through, where nothing seemed so cool as to denounce someone’s film acumen mockingly, with a showstopping dis like “You haven’t seen Street Trash…pshaw!” In retrospect, this was probably why nobody liked me. There was an idyllic time when I enjoyed nothing more than skulking about the local video store (Video Villa) with my pal The Gak and searching for the most preposterous and obscure crap we could get our hands on.

Slime john halkin