Kyuketsuki Gokemidoro

Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell (1968)

** (out of 4)

Japanese horror/sci-fi, which is a mixture of The Blob and Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires. A plane flies through a blood red sky and eventually crashes into the desert. It turns out that a UFO forced the crash and now one of the passengers is a vampire out to kill the others and take over the world. I first heard of this film after Quentin Tarantino mentioned it as one of his favorites and he even payed homage to it in Kill Bill Vol 1 but I found this to be an extremely disappointing film. The biggest problem is that all of the characters are very annoying and rather mean so it's impossible to want them to live through this event. Another problem is the screenplay, which has the characters doing nothing except fighting, bitching and moaning. This grows very tiresome after the first half hour and we get an hour more of it. The special effects are good and the alien/vampire creature is pretty good but that's about all this film has to offer.