Ôgon batto

Kiddie matinée, Japanese style. There were quite a number of kid oriented sci-fi adventure films with costumed super-heroes made for the movie theaters before the success of Ultraman and Kamen Rider on TV. Others that have made it to the US are Starman, Prince of Space and another Sonny Chiba film, Attack of the Neptune Men. Most of these films feature heroes that never really caught on the way the TV super heroes did. Filmed in glorious black and white, the effects were sometimes better then the color films from the same time.

A teenage boy discovers that the planet Icarus is on a collision course with Earth by gazing through his telescope. Scoffed at by the scientific establishment, the boy is kidnapped and brought to a secret UN base in the Japan alps. He is immediately inducted into the secret program whose mission is to finish the Super-Destruction Beam cannon and destroy Icarus. The cannon is missing a special mineral for the lens. The team heads for a mysterious island in the middle of the Pacific. There they find ancient ruins of Atlantis but they are suddenly attacked by a strange drill shaped metal squid spaceship. It's commanded by the evil being Nazu who has engineered the collision with Icarus! He doesn't want to share the universe with humans and he really doesn't want the cannon finished. The action is on and the team discovers the Golden Bat who has been asleep for over 10,000 years awaiting this very moment to save the earth!

It's very hard to describe the silliness of the film. If you've seen other early Japanese super hero films you'll be prepared for the outlandish wardrobe on display here. The villain Nazu is absolutely unscary, a four eyed cloth bear with a robot claw hand and no nose or mouth. The Golden Bat is a strange design for a hero as he resembles the Red Skull of Marvel comics fame. The character is apparently an Osamu Tesuka creation.

The film is well paced and actually photographed better then it needed. At 73 minutes it a good laugh.

Golden Bat, a 10000-year old skull-headed, flying superhero is released from an Egyptian sarcophagus somewhere in the lost continent of Atlantis and flies to our rescue when Earth is threatened by a rogue planet under the control of the dreaded four-eyed furry Dr. Nazo. Also fighting for our continued existence is Captain Yamatone (chop-socky star Sonny Chiba), Dr. Pearl, and their team, including Emily (Emiri Takam), whose bat-pin gives the young girl the power to summon the 'Golden Bat' (a child with this kind of responsibility is common trope in these types of stories). Earth's only hope lies in Dr. Pearl's awesome "Super Destruction Beam Cannon", which the chortling super-villain tasks his nefarious hench-people (the feral Jackal, the scarred Keloid, and the sexy Piranha) to steal. Giddy stuff from start to finish! This film version of a kamishibai character created by Suzuki Ichiro and Takeo Nagamatsu in 1931 (thus predating the similarly super-powered 'Superman' by almost a decade) contains all the expected elements of a kid-oriented tokusatsu adventure (heroic youngsters, secret organisations, bizarre villains, mysterious gadgets, super weapons, last minute rescues, and lots of over-the-top action) and is great fun. The miniatures and special effects are imaginative and quite well-done (for the era and genre), the characters (both good and evil) are fun, and the story moves along quickly to a predictable but satisfying conclusion. I have seen a lot of kaiju, kaijin and tokusatsu films and 'Golden Bat', for all its silliness, is one of the most entertaining. (watched on-line with English subtitles)

I guess the teenagers of the '60s liked it a lot.

Discovered by me on YouTube by chance with the title "Fantomas", the original title being "Ogon Batto", spoken in Japanese with subtitles in Portuguese (I am not fluent in any of the languages). But I managed with my own intuition, guessing the meaning of the words in Portuguese. Ogon Batto or The Golden Bat, is a kind of Superman with a dead head, which... it remains for you to discover what he can do. Funny to see Nazo, a four-eyed monster, not at all creepy, who laughs all the time and orders his soldiers dressed all in black, to destroy the earthlings dressed as astronauts, who want to save Earth from the collision with comet Icarus. The little girl Emily is nice, and Keiko Kuni, who plays the Piranha character, is sexy.

This is a film about a skeleton mummy vampire superhero, who fights a giant 4 eyed space mouse, that rides around in a drill that looks like a squid, and if that's not the most entertaining thing you've ever heard there is something wrong with you. This is the craziest super hero I have ever heard of and I love him. This film opens with a killer theme song and the golden bat character is really cool, he has this wicked cool laugh whenever he enters the scene and when he fight I love how he flails his cane around. This movie isn't perfect, whenever anyone jumps or flys the whole background goes with them, but I think its charming, and this may have been better suited for color instead of black and white, I would have loved to see golden bat actually the color gold, but the black and white doesn't hurt the film at all. This is on YouTube for free so you need to watch it right now, it's only an hour and 12 minutes or something like that so it's not like a big time investment. I need more of this character!!!