1967, Japan. Starring Toshiya Wazaki, Peggy Neal, Eiji Okada, Shinichi Yanagisawa, Itoko Harada, Franz Gruber, Mike Danning, Toshinari Kazusaki, Keisuke Sonoi. Directed by Kazui Nihonmatsu.

Sadly enough, I've had this film sitting around on my cluttered shelves for about ten years now, and I only got around to watching it very recently. What a sad, pathetic fool I have been! Oh in so many ways that rings true, but for the purposes of this review, let's restrict it to the fact that I've one of the absolute swankiest, coolest Japanese monster movies of all time sitting right under my nose, and I didn't even know it.

Imagine Godzilla with a severe dose of Our Man Flint or any of the Matt Helm films. Imagine Gerry Anderson's UFO meets Japanese kaiju eiga. Imagine flying to the moon where men in silver space suits recline in bean bags, sip martinis, and cut the rug with their female counterparts, who have taken the time to switch out of their shiny space suits and into orange cocktail dresses. Then throw a giant monster smashing up Japan into the works, and you will just barely begin to fathom how insanely cool this movie is.

Our movie begins with a flight into space. The year? Who can tell? We have super slick rockets and space gizmos, but we're still driving 1960s style sedans. A team of astronauts (three Japanese men and one American woman) are going into space to see what happened to a bunch of missing space ships. Not exactly the mission one would want. "A UFO had slaughtered every crew we've sent. Go see what's up with that."

Anyway, the crew is the archetypal 1960s space movie crew. There's the spunky but not-quite-liberated woman. There's the stoic and stern captain with regret in his heart. There's the sweaty weird doctor guy. And there's the wacky guy. I am guessing that, sadly, even many of the readers of this website aren't familiar with old 1940s-1960s science fiction, which is a damn shame. If you are, you know that every rocket to the moon, or Venus, or wherever was required to staff one "wacky guy," usually named Jimmy or Corky or Scooter.

No one is sure why or how these guys got their job. They spend most the movie sucking up to the captain, hitting unsuccessfully on the ladies, and doing madcap things like forgetting there is no gravity in space or accidentally opening the window of the capsule or something. You can recognize them by a few distinguishing characteristics, such as frequent scratching of the head, a seemingly permanent "dazed and confused but still happy" look, and their addiction to wearing baseball caps, or at least futuristic versions of the baseball cap. They would, at first, seem like the kind of guy you really wouldn't want on your spaceship.

But they must be doing something right. I mean, in the space flight of the previous thirty or so years, we've never sent up a crew with a genuine wacky guy. And where are we? Haven't even gotten past the damn moon, where missions with wacky guys would be halfway through the "Galaxy of Terror" or something by now. The course of action is clear. More wacky guys in space!

There might have been a wacky guy on the Mir space station. But then, he may also have just been drunk.

Anyway, no sooner does the rocket blast off than the cocktail music begin. We're talking style here, real "Tijuana Taxi" type stuff. On their way to Mars, the rocket is pestered by a UFO that looks like a giant lumpy fried egg. It just sort of flutters around messing with the radio, and then that's that. The encounter makes the doctor guy queasy, so the captain decided to stop on the moon, where is insanely cute girlfriend works. But he is too stoic and manly to really be all gushy.

Once they get to the moon, though, we see why they wanted to swing by. It's a happening place. It looks just like it should have, according to the 1960s. There's more Esquivel-type lounge music. Everyone dances and makes merry and smokes. I don't know about smoking in space. I mean, don't they have to pump oxygen or something into those domes? Doesn't seem wise to me, but then, swank guys must smoke, so smoke they do. I already mentioned that the guys swing with their space suits on, but the women don cocktail dresses for the festivities. This is like a vision straight out of a Les Baxter album cover.

But the fun can't last forever, so the crew packs up to leave, replacing their sick doctor with a new, fat American one. I figure the Japanese doctor was probably faking his illness, because, hell, the moon rocks!

Not too long after they are back in space, the UFO shows up again, this time spitting out some foamy spores onto the ship. Then it flies away, and the rocket goes back to Earth. I guess they realized finding the other ships wasn't all that interesting. I mean, they already knew there was a UFO around, so it's not like that was a revelation. I guess mostly they just wanted an excuse to go to that swingin' moon, and I can't say I blame them.

Back on Earth, the spore quickly becomes ... umm, I don't want to saw a giant wingless space chicken, but that's the closest I can come. Guirara, or Guilala depending on the translation quickly mutates into a silly yet strangely cool looking beast and sets to doing what all giant monsters love to do -- smashing Japan! I swear, at least in the English dubbed version, Guilala's sound effect is just a guy screaming "RRRROOOOOOAAAAAARRRRR!"

Surprisingly, Guilala is impervious to our weapons, but that doesn't stop Japan from wheeling out some of those damn MASER cannons again. I guess they have to get rid of them somehow. The scientists soon realize that the only way to defeat this destructive hellion from beyond the stars is to coat him with Guilalium, a substance generated from the spores they picked up on the way home. So the astronauts must pile into the ship one last time, because no party is complete without guilalium.

Perhaps my favorite moment takes place as the rocket leaves Earth. The film, after being rather light-hearted for the first forty minutes, gets pretty heavy when the monster appears and starts knocking things over. The music gets all Akira Ifukube-esque on us, and is thundering and serious. But man alive, as soon as those mad cats get in the rocket and head toward the moon, the swank Bruno Nicolai music starts up immediately, making for an odd juxtaposition of moods.

X From Outer Space makes me wish the future had turned out more like it was supposed to, with women in cocktail dresses and mini-skirts, go-go boots and metallic purple hair. Why oh why did we let Ridley Scott color our future when men like Gerry Anderson had it so, so right long before? I want my rocket pack, God damn it!!!

The effects here are decent. Once again I will ask all people who like to sneer at the effects in films like this to please watch American films from the same era! Back then, we were all flying pointy rockets into space that shot out sparks and left a plume of blue smoke wafting up behind us. The effects in this and most other Japanese films of the day were just as good, and more times than not, better than the same stuff from America. But we tend to overlook this. I love the 1960s special effects aesthetic. There was a remarkable amount of ingenuity and craftsmanship that went into every scene. Think of how damn long it takes to build a small scale replica of Tokyo just so you can blow it up. It's a craft and a dedication, not to mention a pioneering spirit in film-making, that I respect and long for again.

All that aside, X From Outer Space is simply one of the quirkiest, most enjoyable sci-fi films I have ever seen. How often can you get finger-snapping cocktail music and retro-future bliss AND a giant monster smashing Tokyo all in one serving? It's almost like I expect the scientists to go, "Well, we're stuck," and give up, only to have James Coburn, clad in a turtle-neck, step from the shadows and go, "Perhaps me and my all female team of go-go dancing karate masters can help." I might be kinder to the mindless "cocktail nation" that has conspired to ruin my love of Martin Denny if they embraced X From Outer Space instead of some tailor-made marketing ploy like Swingers. At least it would show they're going for the original material instead of the upstarts, offshoots, and imitators.

But I don't want to turn this into a sociological diatribe. There's plenty of things that are fun about lounge music, even if Details magazine does write about it. And their ignorance about this film allows me to kick back in my space-age bachelor pad and look down at them with smug elitism. Yes, you! You in the leopard print shirt. While you are mindlessly dancing the night away in some club, making out with a doe-eyed cutie in a short skirt who you will make love to later in the night, I will be sitting here alone in my room in my underwear watching a Japanese monster movie you've never even heard of! Yes! Take that, cocktail boy!

Hmmm. Something doesn't seem right.

Labels: Country: Japan, Science Fiction: Kaiju, Year: 1967