Publisher: Columbia Pictures (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, USA)Format: Region 1 DVD, NTSC, Japanese Dialogue with optional English Dub and English Subtitles
Length: 87 minutes
Production Date: 1958
Currently in Print (as of writing): Yes
A member of Tokyo’s underworld dashes to a waiting car on a rainy night with a large bag. But before he can open the door, something grabs him by the leg. He fires furiously at the assailant who is off camera, but the man in the car drives off leaving him to his fate. A taxi then comes and seemingly runs over the man. However upon closer inspection by the police and taxi driver, only the man’s clothes and belongings remain. Inspector Tominaga (Akihiko Hirata) and his team discover the bag contains drugs, which leads to the discovery that they were stolen from a man known as Mr Gold. Gold admits he bought the drugs from a guy named Misaki. Known to the police, Inspector Tominaga and co head to Misaki’s flat where they find instead his nightclub singer girlfriend, Chikako (Yumi Shirakawa). She claims she hasn’t seen him for many days, however the police are convinced she is lying and stake out the flat in the hopes he will return. The police do however capture a suspicious man who attempted to get in contact with Chikako. Tominaga realises it’s his old friend, Masada (Kenji Sahara), an assistant professor at Joutou University. Masada explains that people are possibly melting away in the rain due to contact with fallout from nuclear tests in the pacific. He was seeking out Chikako to ask her if Misaki had been out on a fishing boat and had been affected by radiation. Tominaga finds it hard to believe this theory and asks Masada to stay out their way.
Chikako is menaced by a gangster who breaks into to her apartment, but then strangely melts away once he steps outside into the rainy night. Masada than manages to convince Tominaga to listen to the stories of the survivors of a fishing vessel who came across an abandoned ship. While investigating to see if anyone was on board, several of the crew were attacked by slime like creatures, melting their victims away until only clothes and personal belongings were left. The surviving crew now suffer from radiation poisoning. Masada then shows Tominaga an experiment where a frog dissolves after being exposed to radiation. Yet Tominaga is still unconvinced that the same thing happened to Misaki. During a police bust to arrest criminals in the nightclub Chikako performs in, several people including one of the criminals and a dancer are stalked by and end up being dissolved by the slime creatures, right in front of the police’s astonished faces. Tominaga now realises that Masada was right and has to stop these creatures before it is too late.
This is yet another Ishiro Honda directed sci-fi film with special effects from Eiji Tsuburaya, however there isn’t a giant monster to be seen. It plays very much like a gangster film with a B-movie plot about a blob-like creature dissolving people stuck in about half way. The structure of the film is odd in that way. While in the first scene we see the demise of a criminal, it’s completely unclear what exactly has happened to him. All we see is a bunch of clothes in the rain and wrapped around the bumpers and tyres of a taxi. It’s not until half way through the film that things become a lot of more clearer and the supernatural stuff happens. Until then there’s a police action, a couple of nightclub scenes and even a car chase. Probably because that structure, the film does seem a little slow in spots. I mean it’s advertised as a sci-fi film, but there isn’t much sci-fi for at least half of its length.
When it does get to the titular “H-Men” (there’s more than one), Tsuburaya’s effects are pretty damn good. For a lot of the sequences I really wasn’t too sure exactly how he did it, like the slime climbing up the walls and then suddenly changing directions. Some of the dissolving victims were also quite creepily done. Some 50 years on and the effects still stand up to a lot of today’s effects. Even the blue screen effects with the human form of the slime creatures aren’t bad at all. The cinematography is really outstanding as well. Every shot is well framed and film looks brilliant. The acting isn’t bad at all either. Most do a great job. However I felt Yumi Shirakawa wasn’t all that impressive. She felt a bit dull and uninteresting as the gangster’s girlfriend. However as the nightclub singer she really lit up the screen. If that was her singing the English songs in the film all I can say is I’m highly impressed, though the last one has some odd lyrics (“I met you in the bomb shelter”? What the hell?) This film is also notable for an on screen appearance of Godzilla suit actor Haruo Nakajima who plays one of the doomed sailors. This is the second film the “Icons of Sci-Fi: Toho Collection” set that I have watched. At least on this film the subtitles aren’t bad at all. Except for a couple of unsubbed newspaper headlines, everything seems to be adequately translated and subbed. The disc case sucks with all three discs on a single spindle. In conclusion this is another great Toho sci-fi film from the late 1950’s. It’s very much a piece made for adults rather than the Toho films of the 1960’s and latter which were family films which ventured into clichés and made the genre extremely tired and dull. I’m going to give this film 6.5 out of 10.
Remaining Backlog: 28 months (it's much easier this way than listing the number of discs).
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