As a young kid I loved monsters and scary things in general, especially the old black & white Universal films and the then-current wave of movies arising from expanding fears of aliens and nuclear weapons. The Day The Earth Stood Still was the best of the lot and it remains today as potent as ever.
Recently I watched a film that had also etched itself into my young memory as one of the more terrifying and disturbing science-fiction movies. It turned out to be terrifyingly boring. A dumb script, poor pacing and wooden acting gave me another of those realizations that youthful memory is often not merely softened but also distorted by the passage of time.
Still, there is something wonderful about The H Man, a Japanese film released in 1958. It’s burnished colors surprised me because I remembered it being in black and white (which may have been simply due to the fact that color had not yet made its entrance into TV-land). It looks like many of the movies of the period filmed in Technicolor. The nightclub scenes are almost a parody of Las Vegas at the time: risque dancers and a jazz band and gangsters with greasy hair and smirks behind their cigarette smoke.
This film was made just over a decade after the United States had dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan. And yet here we have American style ruling everything and monsters, created from sailors exposed to intense radiation, roaming the streets and sewers and melting anyone they come into contact with.
It’s all very odd and, in spite of its campiness, quite intriguing.
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