Thanks to the copy in my
elementary school’s library of Godzilla
by Ian Thorne (Crestwood House, 1977), I spent a good couple years of my
childhood pining to see the dozen-plus – if you will – kaiju movies therein
accounted for. It was the pre-DVD, pre-Internet era, and I was 10 and growing
up in a rural locale, so to me, Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster and Destroy
All Monsters were painfully unattainable and thus my expectations of them all the ore aggrandized.
Twenty-plus years later, and thanks
to advances in both mass consumer technology and personal autonomy, these
movies – and related and/or similar movies – are far more accessible. In fact,
my palette has extended beyond not just Godzilla (or, for the purists, Gojira)
movies, and not just Shōwa-era kaiju Toho movies in general, but to NON-kaiju Shōwa-era sci-fi Toho movies … like, for example, The H-Man ( ... as it's known in the U.S., where the English dub was first released in 1959. Though the original Japanese title translates to Beauty and the Liquid Men, the 2009 U.S. DVD release of the original Japanese version still bills it as The H-Man.)
… actually, for a good while,
I didn’t feel as though I were watching a sci-fi film, and in the end, wish I’d been right. Yes, the
title sequence -- with its ceremonial imagery
of hulking ships at sea, a blackened sky cast over them as they’re subjected to
the mercy of a roaring storm – and close-ups of newspaper headlines declaring a
Bermuda Triangle-like scenario – really, really wants the audience to know that
something mysterious and supernatural has gone on and/or is still going on, and
wants you to feel scared and intrigued about it. And in the subsequent scene, when
an apparent bank robber seems to vanish out of thin air, leaving all of his
clothing behind, I’m pretty sure that I was supposed to be thinking, “Woah,
what’s going on here?! I must keep watching, to see the resolution to this
mystery?” But I was actually thinking, “Hmm, because of the limited special
effects, the editing renders things vaguer than I think they were meant to be,
so it’s a little confusing as to what we’re supposed to find confusing.”
Like the original Gojira -- also Honda-directed -- from four years earlier, The
H-Man is a story of horror wrought by nuclear testing. It’s obvious why this
theme and perspective would be recurring and dominant in Japanese films … not
just 10-15 years after World War II, but as late as Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams
(1990). And while Toho and Honda pioneered the monster
movie-as-allegory-for-nuclear devastation subgenre, in other respects, they
were not possessed of an “original voice” or a “singular vision”. Even as a
kid, I noticed that the “humans”-centered plotlines (which actually make up, on
average, 75% of each one) in Godzilla movies seemed to mimic American movies: e.g.,
the James Bond-esque elements in 1966's Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster; the android-from-the-future-on-a-mission-to-alter-the-course-of-history
Terminator knockoff in 1991's Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah. Those movies, though, were
following contemporary – if cross-continental – trends. The H-Man is quite
another case: with its heavy crime-mobs elements, and especially taking into
account the scenes set in a seedy, smoky jazz nightclub, one would think that
it had taken 25-30 years for `30’s gangster movies to be imported across the
Pacific.
(By the way, there’s a team
of about four or five policemen and detectives, including the highest-ranking
one, who don’t really need to all be there. Sometimes, one or two are missing.
Other times, they’re all present. It seems like two or at most three characters
are stretched out across five, for no discernible reason.)
Now, I don’t mean that
derisively: I happen to like procedural detective/crime narratives.
Coincidentally, the premise anticipates The X-Files by over
30 years: an obsessive, solitary professional – in this case, a scientist – is convinced
that the answer to an unsolved crime is supernatural in nature, but all
concerned law enforcement personnel – and pretty much everyone else, period –
believe that his ideas are baseless and fantastical. But it’s just not that character
dynamic that resembles X-Files; they take a similar procedural
approach, rather than a fantastical one, keeping the ghosts, monsters, or what
have you elusive. As far as U.S. antecedents, from my limited knowledge, I can
think of the early `40’s horror movies of Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton, in
the sense that they were worldly and very restrained about showing anything
sensational.
The anti-hero (the contrarian
scientist) forming an alliance and romance with the misunderstood, in-a-bad-spot
bad girl heroine has a distinctly American flavor to it, though I can’t
pinpoint specific influences.
That’s not to say that Honda
and Toho didn't upon spectacle and thrills. The “melting” radiation-affected
humans and the ethereal, translucent beings they evolve into are clearly
intended to shock, gross-out, and scare. Still, as I said earlier, throughout
the scene on the abandoned boats – where the specter-ish entities are first
seen – the eerie, ominous ambiance and slowly-building suspense is pulled off
pretty tastefully and skillfully Unfortunately, working around these effects
lead to awkwardly framed-shots and disconnected editing.
And of course, there’s the climax,
comprised of wide shots of a city quadrant being evacuated by the authorities,
replete with armed vehicles and tanker trucks; and the subsequent wide shots of
the gasoline-saturated river and underground waterways … including a shot of a
vehicle speeding over a bridge as the enormous flames from below tower over and
lash out at it. It would seem that here is where a considerable chunk of the
budget went. And though the desperately-go-right-into-the-heart-of-the-storm-to-rescue-the-girl-and-pull-it-off-just-in-the-nick-of-time
motif climax is intuitive, as well as earnestly, laboriously staged and
performed, the technical limitations
lead to confusing editing. E.g., when we cut from a shot of the encroaching
fire to the principles running from it, it’s not clear how far behind them it
is, or where they are now in relation to the where we saw them in the shot that
preceded the one of the fire.
Now, some people consider special
effects that seem cheesy by today’s standards to irrevocably render a movie
laughable. I see past technical (or sheer budgetary) limitations for what they
are, and in their context, look at the effort being made. So, for me, it’s
Toho; it’s a gritty detective/gangster movie; it’s character-oriented and
worldly, with the fantastical elements restricted just about enough to make the
movie cerebral without being bombastic and overindulgent visually; and it has a
humane, if simplistic (or at least too-brushed-over), “message”. …oh, if it’s
not clear, those are all reasons that I liked it!
-- Ryan
