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| my VHS box art is in less than mint condition |
More popularly known as Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell... which I like more, but would have been tougher to sell to an American audience. Hence the title change and the white people on the cover of my crummy old VHS copy. Which oddly enough seems to have been copied onto a blank tape and sloppily restickered (and not even on the front of the tape)... and the outside art has been cut up and pasted to a plain old sheet of white paper. Damn you, closing Video Update that I got this from 15+ years ago! I should call VCR and report pirated copies going around:
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| they *might* not be around anymore |
At any rate, Body Snatchers from Hell was a surprisingly solid watch. It's a sort of cheesy but still substantial Japanese sci-fi film with some good old fashioned over-enthusiastic English dubbing and solid special effects.
The story isn't anything ground-breaking. A group of 10 or so people survive a plane crash after a mysterious light in the sky seems to disable their equipment. They end up being marooned in some sort of weird isolated desert area, with no other people around. When they go out to explore the barren terrain, a mystery alien inhabits one of them and turns him into a vampire/zombie of sorts - mindlessly stalking the rest of the group and wanting to suck out all of their blood (in surprisingly quick fashion, I may add). He sort of leaves them alone after he feasts on one victim, only to return later. But the survivors have no way to communicate with the outside world and do not feel safe leaving the (still intact) cabin of the plane.
While Body Snatchers from Hell does a nice job making the infected person a menace, it does an even better job of showing how the survivors can be just as horrible (if not worse) to each other. As time and food/water is running out, the thin layers of civility that they were holding onto slowly vanish, and people show their true colors. It's a surprisingly cynical film - and while it gets a little heavy-handed at times (especially as it pertains to humanity and it's penchant for warfare), it's still a good watch. And honestly, I don't think anyone expects subtlety from a film called Body Snatchers from Hell anyways.
I guess the first thing that comes to mind when looking back at this film is the special effects. For a 1968 sci-fi film there is some really effective stuff going on here. The body-snatching scenes in particular are really well done (think a practical T-1000 blob climbing into a slit in a guy's forehead). Some of the scenes where you see the alien craft (which creates a "blood red" sky and gives things an orange-ish look) are a little fakey, but still end up looking really cool nonetheless. I also liked the looks of the victims post-blood draining. Realism isn't necessarily the point here - you kind of know *how* they achieved these effects, but the fact of the matter is that they work.
Also, the film covers some interesting ground as far as warfare goes too. I don't want to get too spoilery here, but the Vietnam conflict and World War II play significant roles in the film. It's actually kind of brave, considering the Vietnam conflict was *still happening* when this film was released (and close to home, no less), and you get lots of stock footage of actual battles and their aftermath. And it's always interesting to me to see how Japanese films deal with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which would have occurred in the lifetime of just about everyone involved with this film. The underlying assumption of Body Snatchers from Hell seems to be that people of all nations should be ashamed that they've let the world essentially become a giant battleground, and deserve whatever terrible fate awaits them. There are certainly times where I agree with that sentiment.
So overall I really dug the film. I think that any fan of Japanese sci-fi (or older sci-fi in general) will get a kick out of it. There is a some (cynical) meat on them bones too, but overall it's still pretty fun film with solid special effects and a hefty dose of late 60's sci-fi flavor.
I would recommend this film.
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