by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Invasion of the Bee Girls Charles and I watched another from the download
backlog, Invaders from Space, a
Japanese movie from 1965 released in an English-language version by something
called Walter Manley Enterprises, which — praise be — at least had Japanese
actors doing the English dubbing, so we don’t have clearly Asian-looking people
playing Japanese characters but speaking American-accented English like we got
in the Godzilla films. Invaders
from Space is marked on imdb.com as a
TV-movie and references are made to the original Japanese serial version, in
which the monsters are kappas,
figures from Japanese mythology. For the U.S. version the baddies were changed
to “salamander men” from the planet Kulimon in the Moffit Galaxy (which sounded
to me like they were saying “Moptop Galaxy” and made me wonder if anyone had
actually named a galaxy after the Beatles this early). The good guy is Starman,
a pretty obvious Superman knock-off (down to the silly hat and tacky suit he
wears in his non-hero “Clark Kent” identity) even though he’s supposed to be a
robot, sent from the Emerald Planet (do you get there by following a yellow
brick time-warp?), sent from two billion miles away traveling at the speed of
light (which, as Charles pointed out, would mean it would take him four years
to get to Earth) to keep the Salamander People from conquering Earth and
releasing dangerous radiation that would endanger life on their own planet,
which remember is two billion miles away. This is also assuming there is any biological life there, since all we see are robots that look like
bobble-headed dolls from the Tokyo Woolworth’s conferring in solemn conference
about what to do about the Salamander People. Invaders from Space is obviously a film aimed at a child audience,
especially since among the key people in the dramatis personae are some typically obnoxiously cute kids, one of
whom stumbles on the key weapon — copper sulfate — that when sprayed on a
Salamander Person will cause them to melt away and become a puddle on the floor
like the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz.
But despite its childish (literally and figuratively) aspects, Invaders from Space has a lot going for it, including some surprisingly
atmospheric shots from cinematographer Takashi Watanabe, a suitable (and
sometimes better than that) score from composer Michiaki Watanabe (any
relation? Could be, even though I’ve heard of so many people named “Watanabe” I
get the impression it’s the Japanese equivalent of “Smith”), and, above all,
some of the most remarkable fight scenes ever staged. Apparently the producers
decided to hire acrobatic dancers to play the Salamander People, outfitting
them in cool skin-tight striped costumes and having them do backflips and other
gymnastic maneuvers, and actor Ken Utsui, who plays Starman (or his stunt
double) matches them and creates some surprisingly balletic action sequences
that are the real highlight of the film. It’s true that there’s a plot hole in
all this maneuvering — early on we’re told that the claw-like fingernails of
the Salamander People are so sharp they can easily puncture even the solid
steel (or whatever the material is) Starman is made of (he’s a robot,
remember?), but in all those exciting martial-arts dances the Salamander People
often get close enough to Starman to claw his skin to shreds but never think of
doing so — but even so, the fight scenes are genuinely entertaining and set
this movie well above the common run of films in its genre and audience appeal. There are also such intriguing
villain characters as the man who shows up as representative of the Salamander
People to demand Earth’s surrender — he’s somehow able to stuff his big
salamander-person’s head into a disguise to make himself look like a normal
Earthling, but he can’t do anything about the scarring on his face, so he ends
up looking like the Joker in the Batman comics, complete with painted mouth to look like a clown; and a
character referred to on imdb.com as “Alien Hag” (Akiko Ono — any relation?),
who stalks around the latter part of the film carrying a staff that makes her
look vaguely like the figure of the Grim Reaper in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr. If they’d only put a few songs into it (there
actually is one production number, put on by the Salamander People in their
headquarters), the producers of Invaders of Space could have had some kind of ultimate genre-bender: the first science-fiction action-adventure
martial-arts musical!
