Last week my sweetie-wife and I decided to add HULU plus to our video on demand services. You see, we do not have regular cable services, the vast wasteland that is television has little interest to us. So what we watch comes from Netflix on disc, Netflix instant view, and now HULU plus, which gets us The Daily Show and The Colbert report in addition to a number of feature films and other tidbits to watch.
This week I decided to watch a Criterion Collection film – a vast number of the Criterion Collection movies are available on Hulu Plus — The X from Outer Space. This is a late 60’s Japanese giant monster movie, the sort of thing I wasted a number hour upon as a young-un, though I have no memory of this particular feature.
This was one of the most unintentionally funny giant rubber monster movies I have ever viewed, and I have seen a lot of them. The film starts with the lunching of a crew on an expedition to Mars. The crew is briefed that many mission before them have failed, and these were the best crews. (In my mind I added and you guys are all that are left!) there are also warning that UFO may have been the cause of the previous failures. (You don’t think that UFO, intelligent aliens messing with your mission is perhaps a bigger issue than say landing on Mars?)They are given a new spaceship AAAB-Gamma nicknamed Astro-Boat with a special new nuclear fuel. (In an earlier scene there was a moment of tension when someone almost dropped the nuclear fuel container and everyone reacted as through it was nitroglycerin.)
En route the AAAB-Gamma encounters a flying saucer that looks like a meat pie illuminated from the inside. It messes with their radio and navigation before flying away. A member of crew is suddenly ill and they must make an emergency landing at the lunar base. Now you might think the illness had something to do with the aliens, but you’d be wrong. He’s just space sick and will have to be replaced by a whiny useless waste of space.
Approaching the moonbase we learn that the crew commander Sano, has a jealous love interest on the moon, she’s the one of course communication with the astro-boat on their approach. She leaves her station in a fit of jealousy, even as others are telling her that the astro-boat is coming in too fast. Oooo disaster is in the offing over her petty jealousy right? Wrong! They land perfectly fine, even though no one warns them of their speed problem. (Guess it was more of a speeding ticket issue than safety one.)
Now I haven’t mentioned the music in this movie. I don’t know musical genre well enough to tell what sort of music they were using, think some sort of skippy, happy, elevator jazz and you’d be fairly close. It was the most wildly inappropriate score I have ever heard, dramatic space flight, stoney happy jazz that did not mix.
So they are on their way back to Mars. Another encounter with the flying glowing meat pie and this time they are dosed with an energy sapping material. Dramatic space walking with happy jazz follows, and they collect a sample of a glowing bit from the energy sucking material. Their energy stores are depleted and a rescue ship is launched, complete with jealous love interest. The refuel the ship and, with sample in hand, fly back to Earth.
We are half way through this movie and still no man in a rubber suit stomping buildings flat. Luckily the monster arrives. The glowing tiny sample – it fits in the palms of your hand, grows to monstrous proportions and what has been described as a 200 lizard/chicken goes on the rampage. There’s badly made models, the slowest jets in history, and plenty of flash pots going off, but precious little action. The military declares, before firing a shot, that there weapons will be useless, then go on the attack and prove it, losing tanks, troops, and planes. (There’s even a fat passenger plan that get whacked because apparently no one close off the airspace over giant monsters.)
Characters get dropped from over one hundred feet up, dive out of jeeps speeding along at eighty miles per hour, and have enormous tanks dropped repeatedly on their shapely legs, and afterwards run with the agility of an Olympic sprinter.
The magical material that can destroy the monster can only be made on the moon, so another quick jaunt to Luna, complete with happy jazz space music, and the heros have the secret weapon. They reduced the monster back to a glowing bit smaller than your hand and lunch him back into space aboard a chemical rocket to take him ‘millions of light-years’ away.
Wow, this was so bad it was funny.