Monday, November 6, 2017

The H-Man (Toho, 1958; Columbia, 1959)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyrigh © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s “feature” was The H-Man, one of the six items on Mill Creek Entertainment’s compilation of late-1950’s science-fiction “B”’s from Columbia — one I bought because I’d seen the film The 27th Day at one of the Golden Hill Vintage Sci-Fi screenings that Charles hadn’t been able to attend because he was working that night, but I was so impressed by it I wanted to get the disc so I could show it to Charles. To my surprise, The H-Man turned out to be not a Columbia production at all but a Japanese movie, made at Toho Studios in 1958 and directed by the Godzilla man, Ishirô Honda (sometimes spelled “Inoshiro Honda” on U.S. releases of his films, including this one), and shot in color and wide-screen ’scope (Toho had their own variation of Cinemascope, “Tohoscope,” a dodge many studios resorted to once they realized that while 20th Century-Fox owned the name “Cinemascope” the actual anamorphic-lens technology was old enough it was in the public domain). The plot deals with a ghost ship that got irradiated by sailing too close to a U.S. hydrogen bomb test in the South Pacific and ends up drifting close enough to Tokyo that … well, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. It actually starts with a drug deal going down on the streets of Tokyo at night, only the dealer who’s supposed to bring the drugs screams out in pain and then literally melts away. 

The cops get several other reports of similar incidents happening — people’s bodies, including their bones, just melt away and only their clothes and whatever belongings they had on their persons are left behind — and they end up calling in Dr. Masada (Kenji Sahara) and his colleague Dr. Maki (Koreya Senda), who’s done an elaborate experiment involving irradiating a live frog and thereby turning it into a sentient green puddle of something-or-other, then exposing it to another frog and watching as the green puddle that used to be frog makes the living frog go all bubbly and then disintegrate completely. The doctors reason that a similar thing happened to the sailors on the ghost vessel — some of them became living green slime and dispatched the others (the flashback on the ghost ship narrated by the two sailors who discovered it and escaped being “slimed” is an intriguing mixture of the real-life Marie Celeste story — “the Maru Celeste,” Charles inevitably joked — and the Murnau Nosferatu) — and the film moves along at a surprisingly slow, leisurely pace before we actually get to see the green slime in action. Along the way there are two extended sequences set in a nightclub where the film’s female star, Yumi Shirakama, works: she plays a character called “Chickako Arai,” though the first name sounded in Columbia’s 1959 dubbed version like “Shiitako” and of course I inevitably joked that she was really a mushroom (perhaps a refugee from another Toho production that year, Attack of the Mushroom People), and of course Dr. Masada falls in love with her. According to imdb.com, her singing voice was doubled by Japanese “jazz starlet” Martha Miyake; I’d heard of a Japanese jazz singer named Miyoko Hoshino before (she made an album, inevitably called East Meets West, with Lionel Hampton for his own Glad-Hamp label in 1964) and wondered if those might be different transliterations of the same Japanese name, but no-o-o-o-o: Hoshino had a rather thin, shrill voice (sort of like what Yoko Ono might have sounded like if she’d made a swing album singing U.S. standards) while Miyake’s voice is considerably lower and more sultry, not particularly “Asian”-sounding and reminding me more than anyone else of Nina Simone. (Of course it’s also possible that the dubbed U.S. version we were watching used a different voice double than the Japanese version.) 

The cabaret scenes originally appear just to add some soft-core porn to the movie — the original Japanese release was about 15 minutes longer than the 73-minute version we were watching and Charles suggested some of the extra footage was of scantily clad females dancing in the club — but the second one is actually the most scary part of the movie: the green slime invades the club and there are some nicely Lewtonian shots of its oozing its way in the cracks under doors on its way to devour some of the patrons. In the end, of course, the scientists figure out a way to kill the stuff by burning it — the scenes of people walking through the Japanese sewers with flamethrowers have an odd appeal — though at the end Dr. Maki warns in voiceover, “If man perishes from the face of the Earth, due to the effects of hydrogen bombing, it is possible that the next ruler of our planet may be The H-Man.” According to an imdb.com “Trivia” poster, the scenes showing the H-Man’s victims dissolving were shot by making inflatable balloons of people, pouring chemicals on them that would get them to foam, and then simply deflating them. One imdb.com reviewer compared this film to The Blob but said it was a lot scarier — which it was; it didn’t have the camp elements that gave The Blob a lot of its appeal — and it’s a quite estimable piece of work from a unit at Toho that hadn’t yet descended to the level of endearingly bad hack-work that gave Japanese monster movies such a bad name in the 1960’s. It was also amusing to recognize one of the actors voice-dubbing a Japanese policeman as Paul Frees, who was Toshiro Mifune’s voice double in English-language films, was a “regular” on Rocky and Bullwinkle and also did the villain, Meowrice Percy Beaucoup, in the 1962 Judy Garland-Robert Goulet cartoon musical Gay Purr-Ee. Someone thought highly enough of The H-Man to do a DVD re-release of the Japanese original in 2009, with English subtitles, but even in dubbed form it’s an estimable movie and considerably above the normal run of Toho’s monster-fests.