Battle in Outer Space (1959)

directed by Ishirō Honda

Japan

90 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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I watched this several years ago when I was first getting into tokusatsu, but remembered it as really boring and never felt inclined to watch it again until I had the privilege of screening The Mysterians to a group of real actual people in meatspace. That got me wondering if this was as forgettable as I was thinking. As is usually the case, it's definitely not - plot-wise, maybe, but this is such a practical effects tour de force that if I were rating it based on that alone, it would get an easy five stars.

This is a semi-sequel to The Mysterians which is connected to the previous film through two recurring characters, Etsuko Shiraishi and Dr. Adachi, both played by different actors this time (Kyoko Anzai and Koreya Senda, respectively). None of the events of The Mysterians are recounted or flashed-back to, and whether or not this film even takes place in the same timeline is ambiguous at best, so... don't worry about it, it's a spiritual sequel. The most important thread linking the two is the basic concept that Honda was toying with, where all nations of the world come together to fight an external threat as one. He broached this subject in The Mysterians, but explores it more fully here, although in different ways. I have heard that Honda considered The Mysterians to be his favorite of his tokusatsu films - this from a director who was usually hard on himself. I do think The Mysterians is the superior film, but Battle in Outer Space definitely fleshes out the international-cooperation concept more robustly, so I wonder why Honda preferred one over the other.

The storyline follows the same basic path as The Mysterians but makes a few changes, most notably that the aliens - this time called the Natarl - are far more distant and honestly a lot scarier than the Mysterians ever were. You don't see a Natarl's face at any point, but their influence is massive: they have the ability to remotely possess and control humans, ordering them to do their bidding and abducting them with their UFOs at will. There's this incredibly creepy scene where the Earth astronauts arrive on the moon and one of them gets mobbed and almost killed by what we're lead to believe are Natarls themselves - I have a headcanon that these guys were actually something like Shocker footsoldiers and not the real aliens, but there's something about that scene that's just so eerie. The Natarls' proportions look off, their heads are too big, they move awkwardly, and there are too many of them. There's a real uncanny valley effect here that overrides some of the inherent goofiness of their costumes.

Because this is an Ishirō Honda film, we of course have one guy who sacrifices himself heroically for the good of the rest of the space crew. This character is played by the inimitable Yoshio Tsuchiya, whose best roles by far are his villains, but he does a commendable job in this situation as well. Another great scene is when Tsuchiya's character, Iwamura, is possessed by the Natarl while driving to Ginza. By the time he arrives there he no longer has a will of his own. The musical score becomes frenetic and disorienting, the neon lights flash across the screen, and we see a dazed Iwamura in the middle of the city, a passenger now in his own body.

Unfortunately, the recycled plot fails to fill out the film's runtime. But what it lacks in plot, it more than makes up for in practical effects. The Mysterians was Toho's big tokusatsu extravaganza, but the effects in this film easily rival it - if not surpass it altogether. Again, although there's many similarities between the two, changes are made here: whereas The Mysterians was almost entirely Earth-bound, Battle in Outer Space is a distinctly space-age film. All of its real standout sequences occur in the SPIP spaceships and on the moon (the lava fields of Mt. Mihara here standing in for the rocky lunar surface). Absolutely gorgeous 1950s conceptions of what the future would look like abound. At about 70 minutes in the plot essentially grinds to a halt and the remaining runtime is filled with expertly-filmed aerial dogfights, but I didn't even care that nothing was actually happening in terms of story because the effects were so fun to look at.

I still think The Mysterians is better, but it's a "two cakes" situation: fussing over the comparative quality of each film takes a backseat, for me, to celebrating the fact that we got two of a very good thing.

The Invisible Man Appears (1949)

directed by Shigehiro Fukushima, Shinsei Adachi

83 minutes

Japan

3.5 stars out of 5

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I recently got together a list of every tokusatsu film I've ever seen and realized that this and The Invisible Man vs. The Human Fly were conspicuously absent. I have seen Motoyoshi Oda's Invisible Man, but that's it in the way of invisible-man movies. So let's talk about this little-known but important early work of tokusatsu.

One can definitely see influences from this on Toho's "Transforming Human" trilogy. Not only in the fact that it's a noir-ish story about an altered human with a little crime thrown in for funsies, but also because the effects were done by Eiji Tsuburaya as his first postwar work (he had previously done effects for war films). I can't compare it to the Universal Invisible Man, because the only memories I have of that are seeing it playing on a TV somewhere in public when I was a small child. For what it's worth, even though the visual language is a direct callback to the Universal film, The Invisible Man Appears was actually based on a different source (a children's science fiction novel). However, Japanese Wikipedia claims that a lot was altered from this source, so it remains that riffing on the Universal original was probably intentional after all.

There's a general vibe of scientific experimentation run amok in the plotline, and the scenario chosen to highlight that is basically the idea that being invisible, you could do whatever you want, including - shock horror - jewel thievery. It gets a little more complicated than that along the way, because there's confusion about who exactly the invisible man is: is it the professor who invented the invisibility formula, or someone else? And is someone taking advantage of the whole situation and dressing up as the invisible man to get away with crimes? (The answer to that one is "yes".) To be honest, the plot was really confusing to me, and it required some Wiki journeying to unravel it all - could be because I was so tired I started passing out during the last half-hour of the film - but, while this is fun as a very of-its-time crime thriller, the real draw here is the special effects.

There's a reason why the unwrapping sequence from the Universal film is still so instantly recognizable. It might have been surpassed by computer animation in terms of quality, but I think - I hope - people still appreciate the effort behind creating an effect so sophisticated at such an early date. It's the same with The Invisible Man Appears. The effects are remarkably good for the time thanks to Tsuburaya's mastery of the medium, and the film is full of shots that take full advantage of the concept of an invisible human running wild. We see the invisible man manipulate objects around him, we see chairs depress when he sits on them, we see him gradually disappear when he removes his clothing. The sense of physicality despite the lack of a visible physical body is conveyed extremely well. (The first reveal scene was so good it almost made me not think about how I was basically watching a guy invade somebody's home and get completely butt-ass naked in front of him.)

It's also just really fun to watch this as an artifact of the time it was made. I was happily surprised to see that there's a scene where the characters all go to see a Takarazuka Revue, which is something I have a little knowledge about and interest in. I particularly want to highlight one member of the cast: Takiko Mizunoe, who was herself an opera performer in real life; she was Japan's first female film producer and a prolific player of male roles in theater. She definitely stands out from the rest of the actors as someone who looks and acts more like a stage performer than everyone else. Aside from that, the only face I recognized was a very young Saburo Date in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it role.

This was a pretty obscure film for a long time, and was unavailable on home media outside of Japan until its Arrow Video release in 2021, which is a shame because everybody loves Eiji Tsuburaya. (He apparently didn't regard his work on this film as being that good, and in fact decided not to stay at Daiei because of it - imagine!) I would love to have a movie marathon of the Transforming Human trilogy and stick this in alongside it, I think it fits really well with later kaijin-type films.