by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyrigh © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature” was The
H-Man, one of the six items on
Mill Creek Entertainment’s compilation of late-1950’s science-fiction “B”’s
from Columbia — one I bought because I’d seen the film The 27th
Day at one of the Golden Hill
Vintage Sci-Fi screenings that Charles hadn’t been able to attend because he
was working that night, but I was so impressed by it I wanted to get the disc
so I could show it to Charles. To my surprise, The H-Man turned out to be not a Columbia production at all
but a Japanese movie, made at Toho Studios in 1958 and directed by the Godzilla man, Ishirô Honda (sometimes spelled “Inoshiro
Honda” on U.S. releases of his films, including this one), and shot in color
and wide-screen ’scope (Toho had their own variation of Cinemascope,
“Tohoscope,” a dodge many studios resorted to once they realized that while 20th
Century-Fox owned the name “Cinemascope” the actual anamorphic-lens technology
was old enough it was in the public domain). The plot deals with a ghost ship
that got irradiated by sailing too close to a U.S. hydrogen bomb test in the
South Pacific and ends up drifting close enough to Tokyo that … well, we’re
getting ahead of ourselves. It actually starts with a drug deal going down on
the streets of Tokyo at night, only the dealer who’s supposed to bring the
drugs screams out in pain and then literally melts away.
The cops get several other reports of
similar incidents happening — people’s bodies, including their bones, just melt
away and only their clothes and whatever belongings they had on their persons
are left behind — and they end up calling in Dr. Masada (Kenji Sahara) and his
colleague Dr. Maki (Koreya Senda), who’s done an elaborate experiment involving
irradiating a live frog and thereby turning it into a sentient green puddle of
something-or-other, then exposing it to another frog and watching as the green
puddle that used to be frog makes the
living frog go all bubbly and then disintegrate completely. The doctors reason
that a similar thing happened to the sailors on the ghost vessel — some of them
became living green slime and dispatched the others (the flashback on the ghost
ship narrated by the two sailors who discovered it and escaped being “slimed”
is an intriguing mixture of the real-life Marie Celeste story — “the Maru Celeste,” Charles inevitably joked — and the Murnau Nosferatu) — and the film moves along at a surprisingly
slow, leisurely pace before we actually get to see the green slime in action.
Along the way there are two extended sequences set in a nightclub where the
film’s female star, Yumi Shirakama, works: she plays a character called
“Chickako Arai,” though the first name sounded in Columbia’s 1959 dubbed
version like “Shiitako” and of course I inevitably joked that she was really a
mushroom (perhaps a refugee from another Toho production that year, Attack
of the Mushroom People), and of
course Dr. Masada falls in love with her. According to imdb.com, her singing
voice was doubled by Japanese “jazz starlet” Martha Miyake; I’d heard of a
Japanese jazz singer named Miyoko Hoshino before (she made an album, inevitably
called East Meets West, with
Lionel Hampton for his own Glad-Hamp label in 1964) and wondered if those might
be different transliterations of the same Japanese name, but no-o-o-o-o: Hoshino had a rather thin, shrill voice (sort of
like what Yoko Ono might have sounded like if she’d made a swing album singing
U.S. standards) while Miyake’s voice is considerably lower and more sultry, not
particularly “Asian”-sounding and reminding me more than anyone else of Nina
Simone. (Of course it’s also possible that the dubbed U.S. version we were
watching used a different voice double than the Japanese version.)
The cabaret
scenes originally appear just to add some soft-core porn to the movie — the
original Japanese release was about 15 minutes longer than the 73-minute
version we were watching and Charles suggested some of the extra footage was of
scantily clad females dancing in the club — but the second one is actually the
most scary part of the movie: the green slime invades the club and there are
some nicely Lewtonian shots of its oozing its way in the cracks under doors on
its way to devour some of the patrons. In the end, of course, the scientists
figure out a way to kill the stuff by burning it — the scenes of people walking
through the Japanese sewers with flamethrowers have an odd appeal — though at
the end Dr. Maki warns in voiceover, “If man perishes from the face of the
Earth, due to the effects of hydrogen bombing, it is possible that the next
ruler of our planet may be The H-Man.” According to an imdb.com “Trivia”
poster, the scenes showing the H-Man’s victims dissolving were shot by making
inflatable balloons of people, pouring chemicals on them that would get them to
foam, and then simply deflating them. One imdb.com reviewer compared this film
to The Blob but said it was a lot
scarier — which it was; it didn’t have the camp elements that gave The Blob a lot of its appeal — and it’s a quite estimable
piece of work from a unit at Toho that hadn’t yet descended to the level of
endearingly bad hack-work that gave Japanese monster movies such a bad name in
the 1960’s. It was also amusing to recognize one of the actors voice-dubbing a
Japanese policeman as Paul Frees, who was Toshiro Mifune’s voice double in
English-language films, was a “regular” on Rocky and Bullwinkle and also did the villain, Meowrice Percy Beaucoup,
in the 1962 Judy Garland-Robert Goulet cartoon musical Gay Purr-Ee. Someone thought highly enough of The H-Man to do a DVD re-release of the Japanese original in
2009, with English subtitles, but even in dubbed form it’s an estimable movie
and considerably above the normal run of Toho’s monster-fests.
