So after waking up this morning with a splitting migraine and double dosing on my meds to kill the damned thing, I stayed home from work. Now that I feel a wee bit better I’ll give you the next installment in my bad movie watching.
I am watching the movies in disc order so next up was a little Japanese horror film I had never seen The H-Man. Given being on the receiving end of two atomic bombs and having fishermen caught in the fallout from US fusion testing the Japanese have always had a keen interest and utilization of radioactive horror in their post-war cinema. The H-Man is a lesser contender for the fare then the better known and better produced films such as Gojira, known to the rest of the world as Godzilla.
In a better movie that cop was a one-eyed scientist.
The H-Man is sort of like a mashing together of a mob/crime picture with The Blob. A crew of a fishing boat encounters a deserted ship and discovers a fluid monster. The monster eventually makes its way to Tokyo and begins massacring mobsters. There is never any reason given for the predilection for gangsters, but hey that’s what it is. The movie’s character are rather stock, the idealistic young scientist who figure it all out but has a hard time convincing the police. A mob gal/nightclub singer who’s really a good person and had no idea her boyfriend was selling drugs. The tough a nail cop but with a good heart and of course, the gangster who is deadly, violent, and develops a sudden third act need for the dame.
The monster is like the blob but man-sized, which makes the resolution of the story rather problematic. In order to get this thing that has killed four or five gangsters the police and authorities burn down an entire section of the city. In addition to the overkill ist is all anti-climatic as they get the monster on their first attempt. I haven’t been more underwhelmed by the end of a movie monster since The Blood Beast Terror when the giant killer moth threw itself into the bonfire.
Next up was 12 To the Moon from 1960. In addition, to the usual terrible exposition, silly science, and overly cardboard characters what aspiring writers and filmmakers can learn from this movie is simple: a series of events do not a story make.
A little know lunar danger – quicksand.
This is a movie about the first trip to the moon, but with a gigantic crew, 12 international top scientists. A cast this crowded in a large production with a big budget would have a difficult time fleshing out all the characters. (To wit; The Hobbit movies) With a limited budget and poor writing the trouble is only compounded. The dangers are mostly standard bad SF movies fare, frequent meteor swarms (I have to comment that perhaps my favorite science error is the constant shooting stars on the lunar landscape.) There is also a love story that come out of nowhere and is equally dispatched back to nowhere, and of course aliens.
While the characters faces constant challenges and the entire North American continent is threatened. (Apparently the aliens fell everything else is not so much a danger) the film has no narrative throughline and as such is simply a collection of and then this happens and then this happens until the story ends. The writers certainly took up sides for the cold war, but then as suddenly performed a reversal that in a better script would have been interesting. In this movie is was just another iteration of ‘and then this happened.’
