ESPY (1974)

directed by Jun Fukuda

Japan

94 minutes

3 stars out of 5

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Another incredibly good international tagline: "PARANORMALISTS CRUSH A STUPENDOUS PLOT TO DESTROY MANKIND".

I don't know why I held off on watching this for so long. I mean, it should have bothered me a lot more that there was a tokusatsu movie directed by Jun Fukuda that I was basically ignoring. (There's a lot of his other non-toku movies that I desperately need to see, but I digress.) It may have been the length; 95 minutes is just about my threshold for how long I can watch something without falling asleep. But it was Fukuda's birthday recently, so I decided to give this a watch.

The film centers around an organization made up of five people with strong psychic and telekinetic abilities who use their powers to fight crime. You're kind of dropped in the middle of the action; the captain of the organization (played by Yūzō Kayama, who looks faintly out-of-place in a sci-fi movie) recruits their fifth and newest member, Miki, after he uses his powers to avoid wrecking his race car, and from then on stuff just happens, there's not a ton of backstory. I've read at least one review referring to Miki as an "audience surrogate" and I think that's an interesting way to put it. Miki is basically only there as a way to introduce the concept of the ESPY group in a manner that feels like you're approaching it from the outside, rather than being confronted with confusing internal politics right away.

The group takes on their toughest challenge yet: foiling an assassination plot that has so far claimed the lives of several important politicos already. Their main objective is to stop the prime minister of Baltonia, a fake eastern-European country, from being assassinated. The actual story is very thin on the ground, but it's padded out to a(n arguably overlong) 94 minutes with no shortage of action scenes, location-hopping, psychic fights, regular fights, and a cute dog.

I watch a lot of sentai and one thing that's essentially a constant is that the villains are always more interesting than the good guys. Maybe this is just my bias as a big fan of Tomisaburō Wakayama speaking, but I think that's the case with ESPY too. Wakayama plays a mysterious character named Urlov, head of a rival organization just referred to as "enemies", and I wish more time had been spent on his opaque and sinister motives than on... whatever else this movie was doing in the meantime. At his death scene during the climax of the film, the plot decides to get a little freaky with it and suggest - basically imply, really - that Urlov either was or was possessed by some kind of extraterrestrial force, which was the reason behind his animosity towards all of humankind. Urlov the human tells a story about watching his father, a psychic, be imprisoned and eventually executed for no actual reason, and it's easy to imagine that maybe this is where that possessing force came in: he struck a bargain with something that gave him immense psychic power, because the two of them had the same grudge against humans. But this is total speculation based on about five minutes of film. Wakayama's compelling performance gave me more to think about than the actual psychic stuff.

This feels like a movie that a lot of people would probably just be watching for the actors who are in it. It's a who's-who of charismatic Showa guys; Kayama is the captain, as I said, and he's joined by Hiroshi Fujioka, Goro Mutsumi, and Masao Kusakari, who I'm really not familiar with (I think the only thing I've ever seen him in was a movie called Invitation of Lust, but we're not going to get into that here). The team's token female member is played by Kaoru Yumi, and her character predictably gets the shaft as the sole woman in the film.

All in all, it's just kind of an odd thing. It reminds me really strongly of Dengeki!!! Strada-5: team of people with special abilities who fight crime, all of them men except for one woman, captain played by a guy who was really famous 10-15 years ago and doesn't usually do tokusatsu stuff. The whole affair has more of a "TV series" vibe than anything. The script apparently existed as far back as 1966, but the boom in popularity of psychic media due to Uri Geller (ugh) was the impetus for finally getting it made in the '70s. Shooting took a month, which... yeah, it feels like a movie that was shot in a month. It's fun, but I still like Fukuda's Godzilla movies much, much better. There's a sense of energy and youthfulness to those that I personally felt was absent in ESPY when compared to things like Ebirah, Horror of the Deep and Son of Godzilla, although that could be because those films were openly aimed at children. Either way, I still think Fukuda's directorial style is better suited to the aesthetic of the 1960s.

As a final note, Toho Kingdom cites a quote from Fukuda where he says he was disappointed that audiences weren't as surprised by Fujioka's teleportation scene as he'd hoped. I gotta say I was NOT part of the crowd who wasn't phased by that. All the other business happening in this movie and I still didn't expect somebody to straight up teleport.