Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell

Hajime Sato
1968

This neat little Japanese horror/sci-fi mishmash is apparently a favorite of pop-culture-junkie loudmouth Quentin Tarantino. The film borrows heavily from Don Siegel's "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," with a stock vampire flavor, and most intriguingly, a Romero-esque take on human nature in crisis.

An orange spaceship flying through a strange red sky causes a commuter jet to crash in a craggy no man's land. One of the passengers, a white clad assassin by trade, becomes host to the gelatinous Gokemidoro, a murderous alien hellbent on annihilating the human race. Parasite and host begin to prey upon the crash survivors who are having a rough time getting along. The assortment of character types are a hoot: a corrupt politician, a morally bankrupt businessman and his trophy wife, a would-be terrorist youth, a psychologist, a professor, a grieving American widow, and the noble flight crew. Each character is unsubtly caricatured and melodramatically portrayed, easily falling victim to the survival instinct of their Id. This makes for some pretty great moments.

There's not a lot of money up on the screen, but a one-two punch of clever filmmaking and decent special effects makes the film sufficiently creepy and fun. The photography's garish color palate complements exaggerated acting and slick aircraft models. Split heads, bodies drained of blood, and desiccated corpses mount in the waterless fever pitch of the crashed jet. Nothing is quiet or quaint here, as the passengers' predicament is highly politicized, mirroring the turbulent climate of the times. Political assassination, the Vietnam War, and the growing rift between classes are stuffed into a plane and smashed upon rocks. And of course, no Japanese sci-fi would be complete without its ubiquitous superstar the mushroom cloud, which makes its appearance here both onscreen and through metaphor in the film's apocalyptic finale.

The naive antiwar statement in cautionary-tale clothing makes a nice backdrop for all manner of bizarre and terrifying invaders, and for all independence days and wars between worlds, the Gokemidoro know its a little too late for us this time around.

Review by Brett A. Scieszka