The H-Man (1958)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

87 minutes

5 stars out of 5

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This is a favorite of mine to watch while I'm on... herbal supplements, but I decided to watch it sober and finally give it a proper review. I'm never sure how much plot to talk about when I write these reviews, because I review movies with an audience in mind who has either seen them or has easy access to Google to look up what the hell I'm talking about, but to summarize this incredibly briefly: The H-Man is about humans who have become contaminated with nuclear radiation and transformed into sentient slime that has the ability to melt and consume other humans. The idea that the post-transformation "H-Men" (this is one of the only times where I think the English rebranding of a Toho movie is more succinct; in the original film they're simply referred to as "ekitai ningen", liquid humans) could retain their mental capacity is something I'll explore later on in this review. 

Honda directed so many movies in which the supernatural element is introduced by way of gangsters running afoul of it that I have to wonder if the noir-ish detective story framework was something imposed by the studio, hoping to capitalize on trends of the time, or if it was something that personally resonated with Honda and the screenwriters (Takeshi Kimura, in the case of the Transforming Human trilogy). This particular film isn't shy at all about where its inspiration lies: the film opens with newspaper headlines about a missing fishing boat feared contaminated by nuclear testing, a blatant reference to the real-life Lucky Dragon no. 5 incident that informed much of Honda's filmmaking.

This film came out the same year as The Blob, and it's impossible not to draw comparisons between the two in terms of how the practical effects for the creature/s in question were achieved. (The Blob is actually the latter of the two films, having been released in September while The H-Man was released in June, but it's still worth thinking about.) But a more interesting comparison, I believe, is the ways in which Japanese contemporary film was lifting tropes from American sci-fi and horror movies and utilizing them to tell stories with different meaning than their Western counterparts. American science fiction of the 1950s-60s was frequently obsessed with the concept of an other, of some invading force - sometimes thinly-veiled communists, sometimes just anybody who isn't a WASP-y American - whereas Japanese sci-fi films of this era seem to be more concerned with the idea of becoming the other. The terror at the heart of The H-Man lies in the possibility that one's body could be so transformed, through the echoing aftereffects of nuclear testing, that one would no longer be recognizable to one's fellow humans and - worse - would have no choice but to act in a way that is actively hostile to non-mutated humanity. Japanese science fiction often feels like it understands the outsider in a much more nuanced way than American films that were being released at the same time.

This is where the idea of sentient slime people comes in. It's not given a lot of focus in the film itself, but there is speculation that humans who have mutated into H-Men still have the mental capacity that they did before their transformation. It's even brought up that they might be purposefully returning to Tokyo out of some kind of instinctual, remembered pull. Despite this, the film ends with all of the known H-Men having been eliminated quite brutally, through the ignition of huge gas fires to drive them out of the sewers and the use of guns (yes, shooting the slime with a gun works; I love the 1950s). Like a lot of Honda's films, the ending is unfulfilling for those expecting a neat, tidy, day-is-saved wrap-up: there's no such thing as hope or optimism, just the stark acknowledgement that the world has changed irrevocably and things such as what we just witnessed will continue happening.

Interestingly, the element of the H-Men retaining their human memories was cut completely from the American version of the film.

It's also just a really good and fun movie. The colors are absolutely gorgeous (that's Toho Scope, baby!) and the music and fashion makes it a perfect little slice of 1950s cinema that exists out of time when viewed through a contemporary lens. These genre hybrids that Toho put out are so fascinating because they allow for heavier topics to be explored using visual language normally reserved for non-genre cinema. 

I've kind of intentionally been talking more about the implications of the concept of this film than the practical effects, because a lot has already been said about that side of it, but I have to acknowledge how extremely good the effects are anyway. It's one of those movies where you would think watching it in the best possible quality would make the effects less convincing since you'd be able to see all the rough edges, but it actually makes it better the more clearly you can see it. I am, tentatively, attempting to start up a tokusatsu film club in real life, and movies like this are the kind of thing I want to show to people.