by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After Earth vs. the Flying Saucers the next film on the program was a 1959 Japanese
movie called Battle in Outer Space,
which basically had all the bad qualities of Earth vs. the Flying
Saucers and none of its good ones. The
screening proprietor scheduled it because he had much fonder memories of it
than it seemed to deserve this go-round, and said it was the first time he had
fallen asleep during one of his screenings. It’s directed by Ishirô Honda, the effects person behind most of Toho
Studios’ big monsters, from a story by Jôjirô Okami and a script by Shin’ichi
Sekizawa, not exactly names that loom large in the history of Japanese film.
It’s a thoroughly dull story about alien invaders from the planet Natal, who
have taken over the moon and intend to use it as a base from which to attack,
conquer and colonize Earth. They also have the power to take over human beings
and turn them into their slaves with mind control, though for some reason they
either can’t or won’t do this to more than one person at a time. At first the
Natalians content themselves with wrecking trains (there’s a nicely chilling
sequence straight out of the 1933 The Invisible Man) and wreaking minor-league havoc, but when the
nations of the world come together and launch a pair of spaceships to fly to
the moon and attack the alien base there, the Natalians take over one of the
crew members, Iwamura (Yoshio Tsuchiya) — imdb.com spells the character name
“Iwomura” but it’s “Iwamura” on the subtitles of the Japanese-language print we
were watching (as with Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, the proprietor had two versions available, one in
Japanese with subtitles and one dubbed into English, but he chose the Japanese
version because it was letterboxed and the English wasn’t) — and use him first
to disable the ship’s ray guns (needed to defend themselves against both
meteors and Natalian fighters) and then, once they make it to the moon, to blow
up one of the ships so the astronauts are going to have a hard time getting
back even if they defeat the Natalians. Battle in Outer Space is one of the dullest movies ever made — while
previous Toho entries in the alien-invasion genre, including The Mysterians (a 1957 production I haven’t seen since the 1970’s
but I remember as fun even though it was basically just destruction-porn), had
had enough of a budget actually to dramatize a war of the worlds, this one
didn’t. Nor were the actors especially appealing — except for Kyôko Ansai, the
one woman in the cast and quite capable in the unfortunately minor role of one
of the crew members (you’d see her in passing and do a double-take — “There is a woman in this film?”), who alas got married and
decided to be a good little Japanese wife instead of continuing her career. (If
she’d stayed in films she could certainly have given Yoko Tani — notorious in
the early 1960’s as “Japan’s Scream Queen” and undoubtedly the world’s most
famous person named “Yoko” until John Lennon took up with Yoko Ono — a run for
her money.) Battle in Outer Space
might have made a good target for Mystery Science Theatre 3000, but au naturel it’s just an hour-and-a-half waste of time and a cinematic burp, one
of those frustrating movies that’s not bad enough to be camp and not good
enough to be enjoyable as anything else.
