Terrifying ten-yr-olds for more than six decades, this might be director Ishirô Honda’s most effective Nuclear Monster film. And that’s saying something when you’ve got GODZILLA on your C.V. (The original Japanese cut: GOJIRA/’54.) Honda wasn’t Akira Kurosawa’s go-to second-unit man for nothing, but on his own films, he rarely balanced horror and suspense elements as well as in this imaginative cautionary: part Police Procedural; part drug gang drama; part nightclub damsel-in-distress; and all Hydrogen-swollen Monster, creepy crawling over rain-soaked streets in the form of viscous blue jelly, a relentless Ooze that will suck your very being away, leaving behind a distressed set of clothes. One unlucky nightclub dancer’s uninhabited black bottom panties a nightmare totem for the ages. Yikes! As for those 1958 special effects in shiny, grain-free EastmanColor, only the Monster now looking a bit tacky. The rest, largely done thru suggestion and wall-climbing blobby goop, can still give a jolt to people past (way past) that ten-yr-old turning his head away from the screen. Especially when the pretty girl goes into a phone booth, unaware this BLOB can slither under door cracks. Yikes again! What a shame no Big Screen options.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: For more Honda, you could pair this to his socially relevant Nuclear Threat monster GOJIRA or try and imagine what he handled on late Kurosawa pics like KAGEMUSHA/’80. OR: try Kurosawa’s failed attempt at Nuclear Threat issues in his atypical I LIVE IN FEAR/’55. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2018/07/ikimono-no-kiroku-i-live-in-fear-1955.html
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