By Margaret Andrews
Watching The X from Outer Space, whose original Japanese title is Uchû daikaijû Girara, is like watching your son’s first magic show. When he was seven. He swirled his wand around and abracadabra-ed while a white dove wing peeked out of his sleeve and the rabbit periodically escaped from the hat before its cue. Your heart overflowed with love and joy because his charm and sincerity overrode his skill limited by age, lack of coordination and practice.
And so it is with this 1967 Japanese monster flick that is part Godzilla, part Star Trek and part Ultraman (for you 1970s, pre-cable, Saturday morning TV watchers out there).
A four-person team is dispatched from Japan’s FAFC headquarters to Mars to investigate suspected UFO activity; previous Mars-bound teams keep disappearing. Naturally, the solution is to send out another team to the same place in the same fashion because, what could possibly go wrong? While out in space, they do indeed encounter a UFO, but manage to escape returning to Earth with a mysterious spore. The spore turns into a monster and proceeds to wreak havoc on Japan. Actually, many spores attach themselves to the ship, but they must have burnt up during re-entry, because there was just the one left which they had retrieved while out in space.
Who knows why this movie stars several Americans speaking dialog that neither matches the Japanese dubbing, nor the English subtitles? It just adds to the camp. The story is full of holes, making logical leaps. The characters explain how some things are possible, like living on the moon, in ways that unwittingly prognosticate ideas found on current episodes of the History Channel’s Universe shows.
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Any hope for the audience to become engaged by the story is shot to hell every time a character dons a solemn and scientific face: “We have to go back to the moon so Mary can do a study to find out how we can defeat the monster who is currently headed for Tokyo and then he’ll be coming straight for us!” And then there is the frantic military commander who sounds like he’s talking to Lassie every time he gets a phone call: “What? The monster is heading for the old mill? And he’ll be there in less than ten minutes?” Who made that script choice? Or was the other side of the conversation not invented before 1967?
And the monster? Meet Guilala. His head is a cross between a stealth bomber and a chicken. His eyes are red beads. His lumpy reptilian body appears restrictive for the poor guy wearing the rubber-like costume, like the little boy in 1983’s A Christmas Story who falls over in an immobile winter outfit and can’t get up. Like Godzilla, Guilala’s screech is akin to the largest fingernails scraping down a metal chalkboard inside an echo chamber. And must every Japanese monster movie contain a trample-through-the-power-lines scene?
The music is deliciously inappropriate - it belongs at a French patio party with martinis and pillbox hats. The most amazing feat regarding the special effects is the absence of strings holding up the models swinging through the sky. How did they do that?
What this movie lacks in story, it makes up for in charm and nostalgia. The space ships and planets are reminiscent of a Disneyland ride from 35 years ago. It’s as entertaining as any classic Science Fiction B movie, where it’s so bad, it’s good.
© LameMovies.net
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