Some more Ishiro Honda films

Battle in Outer Space (1959), directed by Ishiro Honda. Special effects here are courtesy of Eiji Tsuburaya and they are pretty cool. The scenes in outer space and on the moon are effective in a 50s sort of way, clean lines and rocky moon surface with nicely done transportation vehicles that can act like hovercrafts. The miniatures used for trains and rockets and land rovers and so on are catchy, although the cardboard buildings used as stand-ins for New York and Tokyo are less impressive when we see them toppled and torn by the alien rays. The story here is thin and familiar: aliens have set up a moon base from which they attach earth, managing such nifty tricks as lifting up a huge train bridge and smashing lots of buildings, and earth fights back. The aliens, by the way, are something akin to minions. As for earth marshaling its defenses, we have a gathering of nations – including Canada with its red ensign – setting aside differences to coordinate the response to the alien threat. I like the cooperation here, something we see with less forthrightness in Hollywood films with a similar plot. All in all, this is a serviceable contribution to 1950s sci fi.

 

Matango (Attack of the Mushroom People – 1963), directed by Ishiro Honda. Thanks to John and Cole Boivin, we got to see this gem last evening. As soon as I read the blurb on the DVD case, I recognised “A Voice in the Night,” a terrific short story by the inimitable William Hope Hodgson. Hodgson’s story tells of a lonely man floating on the ocean seeking food. Two sailors see him, send him provisions, and listen to his story. The story he tells involves a ship coming across another vessel abandoned and covered with a strange fungus. Soon this fungus has taken hold of everyone on board, and the man telling the story is the only one left. He is in the process of turning into a living fungus. Honda’s version is much the same, only updated to the mid-century, and we follow a group of survivors as they try to stay alive on a strange island. Think Gilligan’s Island with giant mushrooms tempting and threatening our merry band of stranded people; some of these mushrooms lumber about colourfully. The colours are appropriately toned to reflect both the exotic nature of these fungi and the sense of decay and rot in the atmosphere. Both the interior sets on the abandoned ship and the exterior sets on the island are cleverly and impressively designed. The story here is less engaging than the look of things. We see just enough of the mushroom people to want to see more.

 

King Kong Escapes (1967), directed by Ishiro Honda. This is the one with the bad teeth! The villain, Dr. Who, and our hero, King Kong, both are in the need of a darn good dentist. The film also sports a Kong replica, the Mecha-Kong robot who dukes it out with our hero atop a Tokyo tower. The special effects here are rudimentary, at best. The plot has the nefarious Dr. Who (Hideyo Amamoto) attempting to extract Element X from the frozen Arctic so he can sell it to the slinky Madame Piranha, also known as Madame X (Mie Hama). All of this has the distinct flavour of a James Bond film. Indeed, Mie Hama was a Bond girl in the same year’s You Only Live Twice. So we have a Bond villain kidnapping King Kong because Kong will prove to be better at digging Element X than the robot Kong is. Meanwhile Commander Carl Nelson (Rhodes Reason) and his intrepid sidekicks Lt. Commander Jiro Nomura (Akira Takarada), and Lt. Susan Watson (Linda Miller), float about in their submarine, get cornered by Kong, do battle with Dr. Who’s minions, and generally try to save the day. As things turn out, it is Madame Piranha who saves the day; she has a change of heart and forgoes her evil ways. Ishiro Honda has made slicker films, but this one is lots of fun precisely because it is so cheesy.