Publisher: Columbia Pictures (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, USA)Format: Region 1 DVD, NTSC, Japanese Dialogue with optional English Dub and English Subtitles
Length: 90 mins
Production Date: 1959
Currently in Print (as of writing): Yes
Story Outline: In the year 1965, aliens from the planet Natarl destroy Earth’s orbiting space station, then go on to wreak havoc by lifting a bridge to cause a derailment as well as flooding a city and wrecking a boat. The united nations decide to defend Earth and take the offensive by attacking the alien’s moon base. But the aliens retaliate by brainwashing the Iranian delegate in an attempt to destroy the Earth’s trump card; a ray weapon. With that threat extinguished, a team of scientists board two rockets to the moon to destroy the alien base. But they attacked on the way by saucers and one of the astronauts is brainwashed to disable their weapons. Luckily he is subdued and the saucers are destroyed. On the moon, the team begins to search for the base, however the brainwashed astronaut escapes his restraints and proceeds to follow the alien’s orders to blow up the rockets.
Mini Review: Having read in a guide book on tokusatsu films that this was one of Toho’s more superior films, I decided to watch this disc as soon as it came in the mail. That book lied. It’s a fairly horrid film on a number of levels. First the story is pretty much non-existent. It’s just aliens attack; then we blow the crap out of them. We don’t get to know any of the cast and there’s some sort of pathetic excuse for a love story which is completely forgotten about five minutes later. The cast is completely expendable. You could have cardboard cut outs and it wouldn’t make a difference to the picture. The film was directed by Ishiro Honda (bizarrely credited as Inoshiro Honda on the disc), who of course directed just about every Toho sci-fi film from the original “Godzilla” in 1954 to “Terror of Godzilla” in 1975. This is definitely not his best work. As with all Toho films up to 1970, Eiji Tsuburaya did the special effects. Again, not his best work (there’s some crappy blue screen work at times), however there great moments such as Manhattan and the Golden Gate Bridge being destroyed. Another highlight is parts of Tokyo being sucked up by a saucer, but this only works well in a couple of shots. In some shots the buildings look rather unconvincing. To round out the usual trio of creators on Toho tokusatsu films of the period, Akira Ifukube provides a great score with lots of militaristic pieces of music. Topping off my annoyance with this film is Columbia Pictures’ shoddy work on this disc (which is part of a three disc “Toho Collection” set). The disc comes with the shorter English dub and original Japanese version, however the English subtitles on the disc are actually “dubtitles”. So we have sections on the Japanese version with no dialogue with subtitles popping up for dialogue which doesn’t exist. To add insult to injury, the translation is rather “loose” (even with my rather limited Japanese it was pretty darn obvious) and signs and titles are never translated. On a certain level the movie is fun, but it mostly just drags and seems really pointless overall. This probably one of the worst Toho films I’ve seen. I even like “Sayonara Jupiter” way more than this film. 4 out of 10.
Remaining Backlog: 18 months (it's much easier this way than listing the number of discs).
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