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When
my family moved to Connecticut from South San Francisco in June of
1972, I was just weeks shy of turning seven in a foreign and largely
unfriendly new culture, so I was desperate for anything even resembling a
familiar touchstone. Californian afternoon television at the dawn of
the 1970's was a cornucopia of programming that formed the bedrock of my
pop-cultural DNA and geekish interests, including daily doses of
ULTRAMAN, the classic 1966 Japanese live-action series that served as my
gateway into tokusatsu, or live-action Japanese special effects
extravaganzas, but upon arriving in Connecticut I was horrified to
discover that afternoon teevee for kids was like a barren desert when
compared to what I had known before. There were no live-action Japanese
superheroes, the first wave of anime was breathing its last (if memory
serves, GIGANTOR was the final holdout of that breed, and it was gone
maybe three months into my CT residency), and the best that local
channels had to offer was reruns of THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN, which
was already a creaky antique, the Adam West BATMAN, LOST IN SPACE, and a
handful of showcases for Looney Tunes. It was not until perhaps a year
after I arrived that the beloved THE 4:30 MOVIE caught my eye and
provided kids of the Tri-State Area with week-long festivals of assorted
movie genres, with the legendary "Monster Week" being the absolute
must-watch out of the lot. But until I discovered that nirvana —
arguably the movie showcase that had the biggest impact on my formative
years' cinematic education — the going was rough and the pickings were
sparse. I might get lucky and a local station would run a random
Godzilla movie or some classic Universal monster flick on a weekend
afternoon, but other than that I was screwed. However, during that
period of NYC television doing away with black-and-white oddities that
used to be local TV staples during the previous decade, every now and
then some completely bizarre flick would surface from out of nowhere,
giving me the opportunity to see it only once before never being seen on
broadcast airwaves again, and the classic example of this for me was
INVADERS FROM SPACE.
Originally part of a series of early
Japanese serials that appeared to have taken inspiration from the
aforementioned THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN, INVADERS FROM SPACE was my
introduction to the alien superhero "Super Giant" ("Supa Jaianto"),
known in the U.S. as Starman.
Played
by Ken Utsui, Starman was Japan's first onscreen live-action superhero,
"a creature of the strongest steel" who was dispatched to Earth by the
planetary alliance of the Marpet galaxy to handle terrestrial and
extra-terrestrial threats that would endanger their own well-being or
that of humankind. Apparently once another weird-looking alien like
those he's dispatched by, Starman has been physically altered to
resemble a fit Japanese man of the late 1950's, and his array of powers
includes the ability to fly through space and elsewhere, super-strength,
a device that detects radiation and also enables him to understand and
speak all Earth languages, nigh-invulnerability, instantaneous
transformation from his super suit to appropriate street attire, and
unstoppable fighting skills. In short, he was an early example of the
typical Japanese over-powered hero.
Produced as nine short films
between 1957 and 1959, Starman's adventures were bought for release
straight to U.S. television in 1965, given a voice dub of the quality
one would expect for a lesser Japanese import of that era, and re-cut
into four "features" that included ATOMIC RULERS OF THE WORLD, INVADERS
FROM SPACE, ATTACK FROM SPACE, and EVIL BRAIN FROM OUTER SPACE. All were
low-budget affairs that were aimed squarely at kids, and due to their
culture of origin having a more relaxed attitude when it came to scary
visuals and kid-appropriate violence, the Starman films got away with a
lot more than what one would have expected to find on American TV in
this context. I forget exactly how I stumbled across INVADERS FROM
SPACE, but I do know that I tuned into it during a Saturday afternoon
broadcast on Channel 11 WPIX. I came in maybe five minutes after it
started, so I had no idea what its title was, but the events of the
story were easy enough to follow, and I was given enough info on Starman
to get what he was all about.
Starman is sent to Earth to thwart the plans of the Salamander Men from the planet Kulimon, which he does with aplomb, but what sets this effort apart from innumerable other Japanese alien invasion flicks is just how goddamned weird, eerie, and visually disturbing INVADERS FROM SPACE is. For example:
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Cheap though it may be, its DIY costumes, sets, and special effects drip with an almost Lynchian atmosphere, and the Salamander Men — very clearly based on the venerable kappa of native Japanese yokai lore — are nothing if not memorable antagonists. When they engage Starman in combat, they leap and cartwheel with considerable agility, and in one unforgettable sequence they stage an avant-garde ballet performance for Starman's audience of one, a dance recital that swiftly evolves into a full-blown melee that rampages throughout the music hall. I short, it's wall-to wall crazy action, skewed through the anything goes lens of "kid logic."
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A Salamander Man attempts to step to Starman. It does not go well for him.
It
does have a few slow spots, but those are more than made up for by the
film's aggressive weirdness, and its visual impact was such that I never
forgot it during the 18 years between the one time when I saw it as a
child and when I finally managed to track it and the others in the
series down on bootleg VHS tapes at a hole-in-the-wall store purveying
such psychotronic fare on Manhattan's Lower East Side.
During
those in-between years, I fed my hunger for tokusatsu and shared the
interest with other like-minded monster kids, but none of them had any
idea what the hell I was on about whenever I asked if they had seen
Starman. In fact, the sole fleeting mention of Starman that I found was
in the pages of the A-Z horror and sci-fi movie guidebook, HORRORS: FROM
SCREEN TO SCREAM (1975), and the information gleaned there was minimal.
Author Ed Naha only outlined the bare basics of ATOMIC RULERS OF THE
WORLD, slagging it off as having "a plot deadlier than Kryptonite" (not
an unfair assessment), and he ignored the other films altogether. But
then came Michael Weldon's invaluable THE PSYCHOTRONIC ENCYCLOPEDIA OF
FILM (1983), an exhaustive tome that surfaced toward the tail end of my
senior year in high school, and it was there that I finally got a better
grasp on the Starman flicks. Armed with the knowledge found in that
book, I knew that there were four films in the run, but I was unsure of
which one I had seen. When I found them on those bootleg tapes, and I
rented all four, copied them, and then sat down to watch them in
sequence. ATOMIC RULERS got the ball rolling, but it is every bit as
dull as Ed Naha made it out to be. I the watched ATTACK FROM SPACE,
which at the time was presumed to be the next in the roster. That one
found Starman taking on a bunch of costumed humanoid aliens, and while
fun enough, it was rather unremarkable. Next came INVADERS FROM SPACE,
and I was delighted to finally be able to see that elusive movie once
more. The last film, EVIL BRAIN FROM OUTER SPACE, is considered by some
to be the most bizarre of the lot, but while it does have elements that
veer well into kindertrauma territory, in my opinion INVADERS FROM SPACE
is weirder by far, and is easily the most memorable and fun of the
Starman tetralogy. All are available in relatively crisp prints on DVD,
but all can be had for free on YouTube, so I recommend doing a few
quality bong rips and settling down for a date with those crazy
Salamander Men from planet Kulimon.
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