When Horror Came to Shochiku: Eclipse Series 37 (The Criterion Collection)

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This quartet of '60s-era features from Japan's highly regarded Shochiku Company offers a panoply of low-budget genre pictures that range from the sublime to the ridiculous, often within the same movie. Best known for their art-house efforts by legendary directors like Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, Shochiku also delved briefly into horror and science fiction in the late '60s, undoubtedly spurred by the significant box-office returns enjoyed by Toho and Daiei with their giant-monster movies. Shochiku's effort in the kaiju field, The X from Outer Space (1967), is a deliriously weird but naively charming blend of suit-mation mayhem (in the ungainly form of bug-lizard-chicken hybrid Guilala, who returned four decades later in Minoru Kawasaki's even stranger Attack the G8 Summit) and pulp rocket ship thrills. Its harmless camp appeal offers a brief respite before the back-to-back chills of Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell and The Living Skeleton (both 1968); the former is an unsettling survivor story about a group of plane-crash survivors preyed upon by a sluglike alien with world-domination plans, while Skeleton is an atmospheric black-and-white ghost story about the restless spirits of a freighter's murdered crew who seek vengeance on the pirates that attacked their ship. Drenched in pop art color schemes (and costumes), Goke also rivals Ishiro Honda's Matango for its downbeat conclusion, while Skeleton--arguably the best film in the set, and probably least known to American audiences--unfolds like a languid nightmare with its striking, expressionist set pieces and surprising flashes of grisly violence. Apocalyptic freakout Genocide (also known as War of the Insects, 1968) is an unrestrained mélange of atomic and ecological terrors with heavy-handed political overtones and a dash of mad science in its story of the search for an American plane carrying the H-bomb that was brought down by a swarm of mutant insects. The film has a simmering dash of the tensions that existed between the United States and Japan in the postwar years, but it's largely trampled by over-the-top performances and the out-to-lunch premise. Fans of vintage Japanese science fiction and horror will mostly delight in this lesser-known foursome from the Criterion Collection's budget-minded Eclipse Series, which also includes informative liner notes by writer Chuck Stephens. --Paul Gaita

 

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