The Top 10 Best TV and Film Secretions
Where would the world of cinema be without goop? I recall a time in my youth, sitting in a theater seeing Paul Verhoeven’s 1991 classic “Total Recall,” and utterly freaking out when a gooey, mutant psychic alien baby lurched disgustingly from the dripping abdomen of a living human being. The mutant psychic alien baby was, in itself, freaky enough, but the detail that really got to me was the transparent slime running down its lumpen features.
The Freddy worm in “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors.” The monster in “Alien³.” That guy in “From Beyond.” The Gremlins. That tar creature in “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” The Whitney creature in “The Relic.” Melting Nazis. That gooey guy in the attic in “Hellraiser.” Every single one of The Garbage Pail Kids. Every episode of “Double Dare.” Even that awesome He-Man toy with the green slime accessory (actual warning on the package: “Don’t use The Slime Pit with Grizzlor”). There is slime on all of our childhood memories.
Yes, in the realm of practical special effects, we have goop to thank. Thank you goop. Thank you for leaving a revolting patina of stubborn grime smeared haphazardly all over our imaginations. But what goop is the best? What slime sticks to our ribs the heartiest? Well, here I am, your humble critic, here to analyze the various goops, glops, and oozes that defined a generation.
(Please, please, please don’t write in asking about my standards for selection. Trust me; you don’t want to know the details)
10) The “I Come in Peace” stuff
from “I Come in Peace” (1990)
A huge wicked white-eyed space alien (Matthias Hues) has come to Earth on a mission. He has a special device that can, from a distance, inject copious amounts of heroin directly into your heart. Then, just when you’re plummeting through your “Trainspotting” nightmare spiral, he stabs you in the heart with this wicked alien knife thing, and sucks the very living blood from your body. This adrenaline-soaked blood, it turns out, is a high-priced illegal narcotic back on his homeworld.
That’s pretty damn cool. A liquid superdrug made from heroin-soaked human blood. I’m not into drugs, but if I were to try one, that one would be high on my list (or am I just being twisted?). There was a similar conceit in the 1982 psychedelic cult film “Liquid Sky,” but we didn’t actually get to see the aliens making the drug in that film. In “I Come in Peace,” we get to see the entire drug-making process in exquisite detail.
9) Seth Brundle’s vomit
from “The Fly” (1986)
Ever wonder how flies eat? If you’ve seen David Cronenberg’s 1986 hit “The Fly,” you’re sure to remember. Burned into my mind is the image of a scab-encrusted Jeff Goldbloom, merrily holding a powdered donut, smiling hungrily, and then spewing forth a bilious glob of off-white bile directly onto it. He then looks up, self-consciously, and admits, “That’s disgusting.” Yes, Jeff. Yes it is. He then explains, later in the film, that flies break down their food with a vomited corrosive enzyme, then suck up the acid-melted meal. Gross.
And, to make matters all the more wonderful, during the film’s climax, when he is being attacked, Seth Brundle corners an adversary, and vomits onto his hand. The vomit eats the guy’s hand off. This is an enzyme to fuel all our most wondrous nightmares.
8) Dilophosourus poison
from “Jurassic Park” (1993)
Why did the dinosaurs escape their pens? The nerdy, fat computer hacker turned the electrified fences off, that’s why. He wanted to steal some dinosaur embryos for himself, the selfish bastard. And we know he’s a bad guy because he’s fat. Don’t you wish that there were more characters in movies that were merely incidentally fat, and not fat as a character discriptor? But I digress.
Dennis Nedry (Wayne Knight) manages to accidentally stumble into a dinosaur pen, and runs into a dilophosaurus, a species of dinosaur equipped with poison sacs, allowing it to spew superloogies. He insults and berates the dinosaur. The dinosaur reacts by squirting a thick, black viscous ooze right in his eyes. We were told earlier that this oozy poison can cause paralysis and blindness and death. The poison itself is scary enough, but that it came from a flipping dinosaur only makes it scarier/cooler/grosser.
The dilophosaurus poison, I have learned, was made of black ink and KY Jelly. Which, in mind mind, is strangely perfect. Nut then, my mind, I admit, can be a dark and odd place to be (I mean, heck, I have a top-10 secretions list in here).
7) The various Deadite fluids from “Evil Dead 2”
from “Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn” (1987)
It’s always cool when monsters bleed; we’re given a brief glimpse at the creature’s vulnerability. When the monster bled in “Predator,” the human finally realized that it could be harmed, and became more resolute. Sam Raimi, however, had no such interest when his monster bled in “Evil Dead 2.” When Ash (Bruce Campbell) manages to shotgun his own disembodied, demon-possessed right hand, it does indeed bleed a little; A single trickle of blood runs out of the hole where it was hiding. Then a slow, steady stream of blood. Then a gush. Suddenly, the blood fires out at Ash like a firehose, coating his whole body. The blood turns black! Holy shit! Ash spends a good few seconds being blasted by a huge powerful stream of ooey gooey blood.
Then , just as suddenly, the bloody blood reverses flow, and supernaturally sucks back into the wall, leaving Ash coated, and the audience delightfully off balance. This is a surreal moment in a strange movie. It seems for a moment like the monster is either injured or dead, turns into a wonderfully disgusting orgy of gore, and ends with the realization that the demon hand may have just been playing a bizarre supernatural prank on Ash. Bravo.
6) The Water of Life
from “Dune” (1984)
“Dune” is a weird film based on a weird book. It’s bogged down with all kinds of surreal jargon, impenetrable religious rites and pseudo-spiritual ranting. But if one can get lost in Herbert’s labyrinthine prose, or Lynch’s shamed adaptation, you can find yourself getting kind of caught up in the epic morass. If you don’t know “Dune,” I warn you, I’m going to use some strange words:
The Fremen harvest the Water of Life from the liquid exhalations of the drowning shai-hulud. The Water of Life is poisonous, but can be survived. If a Fremen Reverened Mother bodily processes the Water of Life, it can be extracted from her body as the narcotic used in the sietch tau orgy. If a man survives drinking the Water of Life, it will proves that he is the Fremen mahdi, the Kwisatz Haderach of the Bene Gesserit mythology. Paul “Muad’Dib” Atreides could survive it, thanks to his experience with the gom jabbar.
I’ve read Dune and seen the film, and I still couldn’t exactly decipher what this means, but, I tell you, that magical blue worm fluid (that looks more than a little bit like Barbacide) sounds like it packs a punch. And that you have to go through such an arduous process to get it… well, that makes it cooler.It’s like the world’s strongest booze. And it’s secreted by desert monsters.
5) Slurm
from “Futurama” (1999-2003, 2010)
This is the only ooze on this list that sounds like it’s delicious. In the year 3000, the most popular soda product is a green fluid known as Slurm. Slurm is sweet, ubiquitous, and highly addictive. It’s made on a faraway planet, deep within a Wonka-like wonder factory.
Or is it? After some investigation, it is revealed that Slurm is actually excreted out of the pulsating waste vacuole of a grimy, overfed, bloated roundworm. It has to be massaged out of the worm’s anus-like aperture. Directly into the can. And then you drink it. It’s bright green, unadulterated sweetened worm waste. And you drink it. The worm waste. You drink the worm waste. Good God, if I don’t want to drink me some of that.
I guess this was appetizing enough, and Fox has decided to market Slurm for consumption here in the 21st century. It’s no longer available, but check it out: http://www.amazon.com/Futurama-Slurm-Energy-Drink/dp/B001BZCBA0
4) Black Alien Oil
from “The X-Files” (1993-2002)
This is no mere goo. This is a viscous, slippery oil from space, lousy with extraterrestrial bacteria. Its origins are shrouded in mystery, and even its function seems to change. What we do know is that there is a shadowy cadre of government spooks who have been kidnapping people, and pouring this ooze onto their faces in underground slave-harvesting farms. The ooze seeps into their facial orifices, and swims creepy across their eyeballs. They are then, somehow, mind-controlled agents of the alien conspiracy.
When I think of the government controlling my mind, I usually picture it working something like that.
But then, in 1998, when “The X-Files” movie was released in theaters, the black alien oil changed function. If it festered in your face for too long, it would grow and seep throughout your whole body, and eventually take the form of an alien fetus, growing in your abdomen. So what we have is essentially a slippery, gooey, living mind control oil that can, if left unattended, become space alien semen.
And you wonder why I want to write about goop.
3) Ectoplasm
from “Ghostbusters” (1984) and “Ghostbusters 2” (1989)
It turns out that when you die, you still get something of a physical form. You can move furniture, emit light, and basically haunt your old haunts. The only downside is you leave a slick, translucent mucous all over everything you touch. You pass through a wall, and a large, moist dripping snot spot is left behind you. On the plus side, you can smear ooze all over the people you don’t like, as happens to Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) in that famous scene in “Ghostbusters.”
This is a revolting looking stuff, this ectoplasm, that is only slightly thicker than breakfast syrup. It doesn’t seem to come off your hands very easily, and can be produced in massive quantities.
In “Ghostbusters 2,” the ectoplasm gets the star treatment, transforming into a psychic unguent residue that is produced by negative emotions. You can yell at it, and it gets pissed off. You can play music, and it dances. And, in a scene which is thankfully left offscreen, you can have sex with it. You can’t say that about too many secretions.
Or can you?
2) Regan MacNeil’s vomit
from “The Exorcist” (1973)
When little Regan MacNeil became sick, her symptoms didn’t seem to match any known disease or mental illness. She would become violent. Her voice seemed to change. She started speaking languages she may not have known before. Her head could twist backwards over her shoulders. Her skin began to fester and flake off. She would exhibit violent sexual behavior toward others and toward herself. And, most shockingly, she would spew forth enormous quantities of horrific green vomit from deep within her throat.
William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel is a classic, and William Friedkin’s 1973 film version is, to this day, one of the best and scariest films ever made, using silence and calm to offset the sudden moments of violence and shocking horror. It also, not incidentally, implied that The Devil is doing active harm to human beings in this modern day and age. Most of us saw the film when we were perhaps too young to have seen it, and that pea-soup barf shooting out of Linda Blair’s 12-year-old face is enough to make us have nightmares for years.
The pea soup barf is the second bast secretion of all time.
1) The various oozes from “Alien”
from “Alien” (1979)
One of the best movie monsters ever invented was the creature form Ridley Scott’s “Alien.” It was a bony creature that looked like a vicious aspic with teeth. And, if you managed to break its tough hide, it would bleed a bright yellow fluid that could eat through metal. That’s right, it’s a creature so very indestructible, that it’s very blood is molecular acid. Acid blood. Pretty cool, and way creepy.
There was also the shiny patina of slime coating the alien. It always looked wet. Was it sweating? Was its slimy, slick sweat also dangerous? It’s gross to think about.
“Alien” also featured a scene in which an android had its head ripped off, and a mysterious white liquid sprayed from its every mechanical wound. What was that milky stuff? Coolant? Fuel? Android blood? Later on, when the damaged android is allowed to speak again, it does so through a gurgling pocket of that crusty, dried white fluid. That’s a pretty good secretion.
Honerable Mention) Whatever is inside Torgo’s knees
From “Manos: The Hands of Fate” (1966)
Torgo is a stuttering, Tourette’s inflicted, filthy little ur-man who wears dirt-encrusted burlap clothing, and has a beard that looks like it still contains desserts from 15 years ago. And, to make him all the more terrifying, filmmaker Harold P. Warren decided to give him big knees. The intention was to make Torgo a satyr, with goat legs hidden under his pants, but the effect made it look like Torgo had enormous lumpy cysts on his thighs. Try contemplating the exact color, quantity, and consistency of Torgos infected fetid pus. O the horrors of the imagination.
Other famous secretions:
The ooze that comes from the Mugwump’s head in “Naked Lunch.”
The floating pink Klingon blood from “Star Trek VI.”
The copious amounts of petroleum jelly in The Cremaster Cycle
The living blood sample from John Carpenter’s “The Thing”
The blood-like battery fluid from “Short Circuit 2”
The “hair gel” from “There’s Something About Mary”
The Stuff from “The Stuff”
The living snot-based mucous clone of The Tick from “The Tick”
The brain juice from “Puppet Master II”
When he’s not writing about unguents and oozes, Witney Seibold can be seeing gadding about town, smiling quietly to himself, seeing bizarre cult movies at funky local arthouses, thumbing through record shops, and writing aricle for his own personal ‘blog which has over 650 articles posted to date, some of which are actually worht reading. You can read more here: http://witneyman.wordpress.com/
