Kyuketsuki Gokemidoro

This isn't one of those typical rubber suit movies where a giant beast smashes everything in sight while being shot at by toy airplanes. This is a slick, well-done horror/sci-fi that blends many elements and does it well.

There's some vampires, people's minds being taken over, driven insane, killing each other, invading aliens with sinister plots, and a lot of innocents in peril. This is the stuff of a good horror flick. The movie opens with a UFO sighting, and a plane being knocked out of the sky and forced to crash land in the wilderness. From there, evil starts to infect the survivors of the airplane, and a desperate battle for survival is on. All levels of conflict ensue: characters against each other, the environment, and even themselves.

A lost gem of the horror/sci-fi genre, worth seeing.

Goke is one of those films that I had only heard about in the 1980's but was never able to see. It had a reputation among the hard core film fans as something out of left field but not very good. Many years later I had forgotten about the film but had chanced across director Sato's deliriously silly kid's film "Golden Bat". I was rather surprised that this film was by the same man.

The film is very artificial from the first shot of a model jet in front of a red sky to the rock quarry most of film takes place in. Most Japanese film fans will recognize this quarry. It's in samurai films, gangster films and every other episode of Power Rangers. The cheapness is off-set by the care of the direction and photography. The special effects are super color saturated and very bizarre at times. While definitely not a children's film, Sato utilizes a number of techniques from Golden Bat including the generic action music and the kabuki inspired movements for the possessed.

The energy that's put into this film makes up for the logic gaps, bad acting and cheapness. The ending is very unexpected, nightmarish and disturbing. Finishing this film is like waking from a very bad night of sleep. As Sato has no further films in his listing here yet lived for quite a while after, I wonder what was his state of mind while making this film.

Recommended.

It's a survivalist sci-fi thriller with aliens and vampires but mostly about victims of an airline crash. No routine action special-effects film, it's often artful and philosophical, certainly sermonizing on a variety of social-political issues (mostly war, politicians, munitions manufacturers, political assassinations, terrorists, hijackers, and general human nature), and is unusually bleak for a modest-budget genre film.

An American girl is one of the passengers here, too, but she's a Vietnam war widow traveling to retrieve her husband's remains, a fact that will determine the direction of some of the action once things start to happen. It starts off as an airline disaster film, and gradually evolves into sort of a weird blend of Night of the Living Dead, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, War of the Worlds (or Independence Day), and The Last Man on Earth, with perhaps a tinge of Melancholia.

I saw a cheap pan & scan VHS of an English dub of this film years ago but I found a Japanese DVD of it recently and even though it is not dubbed or subtitled, and I don't speak Japanese, it is still quite unsettling. The Japanese don't play when it comes to stories like this and they don't pull punches either. At least the disc is widescreen, preserving the Shockiku Grandscope compositions. If you have seen KILL BILL Vol. 1, you will find out that even Quentin Tarantino was inspired by this film once you see the opening scenes. The special effects are usually not realistic but are quite imaginative. The whole film could be seen as something of a morality fable.

There is definitely a message to the film, although most people write this one off because of it's exploitative sounding title. There are several very creepy and effective scenes in the film and this film left a lasting impression on me. I think someday this film will be recognized for the horror classic that it is. Even if you have to watch a pan & scan dubbed copy, it is well worth catching.

By the way, the English-language version is called GOKE, BODY SNATCHER FROM HELL. It certainly got my attention. Pacemaker was the American distributor. I first saw it on a lousy VHS rental copy. Rumors about a letterboxed American NTSC release to DVD have yet to be fulfilled but I remain optimistic.

Thanks to Quentin Tarantino homaging 'Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell's blood red sky in 'Kill Bill: Vol. 1' I can finally get to see this obscurity on DVD in Japanese with English subtitles, instead of a badly dubbed fading old VHS tape. Yay! Okay, this is a b-grade movie and the effects are pretty lousy (especially the plane crash sequence), but to say it's a bad movie is far from the truth. For me it's the perfect example of a low budget horror movie transcending its limitations, coming up with something surprisingly creepy and surreal (See also William Castle's 'The Tingler', Herk Harvey's 'Carnival Of Souls', Coffin Joe's 'At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul',etc.) The opening is terrific - a plane flies through an eerie red sky and birds throw themselves at the windows in sheer terror. There's a suspected bomb on board and the plane crashes after sighting a UFO. On the ground the survivors are initially worried about the basics, like water and rescue, plus the presence of a suspected assassin, but pretty soon they also have to contend with a bizarre alien invasion! Like I said, many of the special effects are cheesy, but they're still effective. The acting is generally quite good, the alien will freak you out, and there's several interesting references to the Vietnam war, which was unexpected and gave the movie quite a unique background (can you remember any American SF movies of the 1960s even MENTIONING Vietnam?). I highly recommend 'Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell' to all horror fans who treasure the offbeat and the unusual. Hopefully this overlooked movie will now reach a larger audience. QT, I salute you!