Original title: Kyuketsuki Gokemidoro

His odd Japanese horror/science fiction film from director Hajime Satô is a far cry from the pulp sensibilities of the contemporary giant monster films. Satô had several previous genre films and television episodes, including Kaidan semushi otoko/The Ghost of the Hunchback (1965), Kaitei daisensô/The Terror Beneath the Sea (1966), Ôgon batto/The Golden Bat (1966) and episodes of Akuma-Kun (1966) and Captain Ultra (1967) and there was some interesting work there, but Goke, Bodysnatcher from Hell, funded by Shochiku, the oldest of the “Big Four” Japanese production companies, remains possibly his best and best-known work.

An airliner flies through a fiery red sky (“it’s like flying through a sea of blood”), an image so indelible that Quentin Tarantino replicated it for the bride’s arrival in Japan on Kill Bill Vol.1 (2003) (perhaps inevitably, Goke is one of the seemingly inexhaustible number of films that Tarantino has claimed to be a favourite). A message is received that there’s a bomb on board and co-pilot Ei Sugisaka (Teruo Yoshida) and stewardess Kuzumi Asakura (Tomomi Sato) check the passengers’ bags. It turns out to have been a hoax perpetrated by a young passenger but during their search, they find a rifle in the bag of Hirofumi Teraoka (Hideo Ko), who rushes the cockpit and threatens the captain (Hiroyuki Nishimoto) at gunpoint that if he doesn’t divert the plane to Okinawa. But his plot is interrupted when the aircraft is buzzed by a UFO that knocks out the controls and causes it to crash on an uncharted island.

A handful survive the crash, including Sugisaka, Kuzumi, Teroaka, American widow Mrs Neal (Kathy Horan, an American actress whose entire career was based in Japan), Senator Mano (Eizô Kitamura), arms dealer Tokuyasu (Yuko Kusunoki) and his wife Noriko (Yûko Kusunoki), psychiatrist Dr Momotake (Kazuo Kato), space biologist Professor Toshiyuki Saga (Masaya Takahashi) and the young original perpetrator of the hoax bomb threat. Teroaka abducts Kuzumi and runs off into the surrounding jungle where they stumble upon a glowing spaceship. Teroaka is attacked by a strange pulsating blob that causes his face to crack open, turning him into a bloodthirsty monster possessed by a member of the alien race, the Gokemidoro who have invaded Earth, planning to wipe out the entire human race. Much carnage and mayhem ensues.

Teroaka’s face, cracked open with a livid scar from down his forehead, is one of those haunting images that used to turn up in books on horror and science fiction films all the time during the 70s and 80s, raising our expectations. Fortunately, the film is good enough to survive the weight of those expectations, a very dark and misanthropic piece full of some of the nastiest characters you’ll ever spend 90 minutes with. The philosophising can get a bit heavy-handed in places (there’s a serious anti-war message running throughout – this was the time of the Vietnam War after all) and the predictably sub-standard English dub doesn’t really help. But there are other pleasures to be found in this very offbeat tale.

First and foremost, although some of the model work doesn’t convince (that plane crash is pretty poor), there are some garishly startling visuals to be found here. Those opening scenes in the fiery red clouds are particularly striking, the glowing orange UFO is great and of course that hideous wound to Teroaka’s face would have been the stuff of nightmares for any youngsters who happened across it. Satô deploys tinted still images, suicidal birds launch themselves against the airliner, the hijacker villain disintegrates into dust, and proceedings are brought to a close with a nicely apocalyptic ending as the extent of the Gokemidoro invasion finally becomes clear. It’s all marvellous – if relentlessly bleak and nihilistic – stuff, playing more like an extended episode of The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) than any of the monster romps that were being made over at Toho.

One might have pause to wonder how and why the Gokemidoro launched their invasion but seeing the story as not so much a literal, and early, tale of space vampires but as an allegory. Whether it works as an allegory or not is debatable (the fact that the Gokemidoro remain entirely inscrutable, and their motivations are obscure will alienate some) but as a straight-ahead horror/science fiction film it works perfectly well.

By the start of the 1960s, Shochiku were seen as purveyors of rather old-fashioned films and decided to up their game by creating the Nuberu bagu, the Japanese New Wave which gave an early home to Nagisa Oshima, but still struggled. It was a bad time for the Japanese film industry – Shintoho had gone bankrupt in 1961 and Daiei were heading the same way (they’d collapse in 1971) and Nikkatsu and Toei had been forced to crank out gangster movies and soft porn to stay afloat. Goke, Bodysnatcher from Hell was a rare horror film from the studio, and it marked the end of Satô’s film career – he would only work on television from now on and then only sporadically. Which is regrettable as he has a good eye for the macabre and more like this from both him and Shochiku would have been greatly appreciated.