a.k.a. KYUKETSUKI GOKEMIDORO / BODY SNATCHER FROM HELL
Shochiku Co. ltd [1969] 84′
country: Japan
director: HAJIME SATO
cast: TERUO YOSHIDA, TOMOMI SATO,
cast: EIZO KITAMURA, HIDEO KO
“There’s no fun in the world anymore . . .” Matsumiya, the bomber
Flight JA 307 seems destined for disaster from the outset of Hajime Sato’s final film, with it flying through ominous and seemingly endless blood-red skies. The motley assortment of passengers are already on edge – be it from the recent assassination of the British ambassador to Japan or the birds smashing themselves into a bloody pulp on the airliner’s windows. To make matters worse, the pilots receive a message that a bomb may be hidden aboard the plane. Co-pilot Sugisaka heads out into the cabin to check the passenger’s bags, only to stumble upon the political assassin responsible for the British ambassador’s murder. In no time at all, the plane is under the control of the would-be hijacker, who destroys the radio and sends the flight on an impromptu course towards Okinawa.
As the two pilots steer the plane off of its scheduled course, a passenger’s one-way radio reports an unusual development – an unidentified object has entered Japanese air space, with the JSADF and US Air Force both in hot pursuit. Unknown to all aboard, the hijacker has sent the plane straight into the path of the oncoming unidentified object – a pulsing orange UFO that shorts out the plane’s controls and sets one of its engines ablaze. And so, nary 10 minutes into the film, flight JA 307 has crashed into a barren valley well off the beaten path.
Only a handful of the passengers and crew survive – co-pilot Sugisaka, stewardess Asakura, politician Mano, arms manufacturer Tokuyasu, his wife Noriko, psychiatrist Momotake, space biologist Saga, would-be bomber Matsumiya, and American Mrs. Neal, on her way to collect her dead husband’s remains from a US air base in Japan. Combined they offer a bizarre crosscut of the world at large – with Sugisaka and Asakura representing the better aspects of humanity and the rest, the worst. Mano, a duplicitous alcoholic, is up for re-election and sleeping around with Noriko, a “gift” from Tokuyasu, who hopes to garner a big government weapons contract from the affair. Both Momotake and Saga are coldly analytical, preferring observation of the events around them to action. Matsumiya proves to be a suicidal maniac as well as a coward, burying his bomb just outside of the plane and immediately making a failed run for safety.
The survivors take to quarreling almost immediately – over the drinking water, politics, and anything else they can imagine. Sugisaka tries, and fails, to bring the group together, but shaky alliances and personal agendas get in the way of any potential cooperation. Meanwhile, the hijacker turns out to be not nearly so dead as everyone imagined and, after piecing together his rifle, kidnaps Ms. Asakura and steals away with her into the night. Little does he know that the UFO responsible for the crash of the plane has landed nearby – its occupants eager to use the assassin for their own fiendish purposes . . .
Soon the remaining passengers, all deaf to the advice of Sugisaka, are being threatened from all sides. The assassin, turned into a scarred vampiric monster by the alien visitors, creeps about outside preying on whoever happens by while the infighting within the group intensifies. Alliances between members are formed without thought and only to serve the immediate desires of those involved – for instance, the entire group turns against Sugisaka and Ms. Asakura, locking them in the cockpit of the crashed plane and offering up would-be bomber Matsumiya to the possessed hijacker just so they can see the vampire’s attack in person. In the end, however, all of these alliances fall apart and the survivors are picked off one by one, with only the eternally hopeful Sugisaka and Ms. Asakura managing to escape the carnage and return to civilization . . .
“It is your own fault that we have chosen you for annihilation . . .” The Gokemidoro
What they find is less than heartening – the whole of mankind, save for them, seems to have already been dispensed with by the Gokemidoro, who view mankind as a violent pest species best dealt with before it expands its reach beyond Earth. The ending of the film is still amazingly effective and must have felt like quite a cruel trick to the original audiences – the camera zooms out from the Earth as the title theme plays, preparing those watching for the inevitable “THE END”. Instead, a horde of the Gokemidoro ships appear, flying in formation towards the Earth – the atmosphere turns red with atomic fire and, in the end, the planet is left cratered and barren as a moon.
From all accounts, GOKE went largely unnoticed upon its original release (one imagines that if had been more successful, Hajime Sato would have produced something after it) with no US release of it coming until nearly a decade after its production. In spite of that lack of initial success, GOKE has shown remarkable staying power – being one of those films whispered about by curious cult cinema enthusiasts, occasionally rented on VHS, and eventually given new life thanks to a handful of (sadly foreign) DVD releases and airtime on nationwide cable network Turner Classic Movies.
The biggest reason for that staying power is that, underneath its fantastic Mario Bava-inspired pulp aesthetic, GOKE is a serious and cynical take on the very worst aspects of human nature. The screenplay, provided by Susumu Takaku and Kyuzo Kobayashi, offers precious few instances for humor, unintentional or otherwise, and takes a grim inspiration from the newspaper headlines of the day. With the war in Vietnam steadily escalating, political assassinations becoming all too common, and man’s seemingly inherent inhumanity to man showing itself on a mass scale, Takaku and Kobayashi’s screenplay served as a fervent, if largely ignored, warning to a world that seemed to be racing head first towards its own destruction.
Thematically speaking, GOKE bares a very close resemblance to Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, which was released the same year. The focus of both films is on a doomed group of individuals whose failure to cooperate results in their demise at the hand of a hostile outside threat. We see both groups form hasty alliances that invariably fall apart by the end of the feature, with the seemingly correct actions of the authority figures (Ben in NIGHT and Sugisaka in this film) failing to save them in the end.
Where the two differ is clearly in style – NIGHT embraced a noir-esque aesthetic out of necessity (how many films were being shot in full frame black and white in 1968, anyway?) with a tendency towards documentary realism. The pop art sensibilities of GOKE are obviously inspired by the work of Mario Bava and other European directors, with garish visuals and vibrant primary colors being the order of the day – the trademark image of the assassin walking into the pulsing orange Gokemidoro saucer is a good indicator of the rest of the film’s aesthetic.
Performances are steady, if a bit ham-fisted, throughout, with Japanese B-movie regular Kathy Horan proving herself to be the weakest of the participants. Sato’s direction is sound, proving to be far more subtle than initial viewings may suggest, with the most dramatic of moments punctuated with Shunsuke Kikuchi’s infectiously over-the-top score. Production designer Tadataka Yoshino deserves special mention for creating GOKE‘s out-of-this-world visuals, as does cinematographer Shizuo Hirase for so wonderfully utilizing the cinemascope aspect ratio.
Pacemaker Pictures released GOKE stateside as a reasonably dubbed affair (the dubbed Kathy Horan comes off better than the real thing, in my opinion) under the exciting moniker BODY SNATCHERS FROM HELL. While VHS copies of that version are still in circulation here, I highly recommend the New entertainment World release from Germany under the title GOKE VAMPIR AUS DEM WELTALL – as reviewed elsewhere on this site, the disc is subtitled in English with audio available in English, Japanese, and German. It’s reason enough to take the plunge and get a region-free DVD player in and of itself.
With Halloween quickly approaching and vampires still all the rage, WTFFILM can’t think of a better way to celebrate than with a showing of this marvelous bit of Japanese shock cinema. Suitably effective, substantive, and wonderfully produced and directed, GOKE comes very highly recommended.
