The X from Outer Space

Though a bit slow at the beginning, THE X FROM OUTER SPACE is one of those over-the-top silly Japanese monster movies that they just don't make anymore and is totally fun to watch because you can't believe how silly everything is. The film is very juvenile and was most likely made for 5 year old kids more than anyone else.

If you listen to the dialogue at the beginning of the film, when the astronauts are introduced, there are a lot of double entendres to be heard, like when the man tells a grinning Lisa (Peggy Neal) "However, you are to touch nothing unless specifically authorised by the Captain Sano." ARF!!! I wonder if the folks who dubbed the film deliberately made it sound so funny.

The scene on the moon or in space are pretty much pointless but they're funny nonetheless. The best thing in the movie is the monster itself, Guilala (what a sad name for a monster!). When Guilala attacks, it walks about like a drunken fool, as if it got no clue of what it was doing. Maybe the guy in the suit couldn't keep his balance because the models were so cheap and fragile. The monster's roar was really funny to hear. Like someone clearing his throat. When Guilala shoots its fireballs, it looks like he's burping them out. The whole moment when the monster destroys a building and Lisa gets trapped beneath some rubble, they make a big deal about the fact that her leg is trapped and she's in pain is priceless because soon afterwards, she walks about like nothing had happened. Another great scene is when Guilala runs after a truck. It's laugh out loud funny. But the really goofy thing about this film is how fast the characters go from the earth to the moon, and vice versa. It's like the moon was only a couple of miles away and as easy to access as the nearest shopping mall.

But the film is not all goofiness. When the monster turns into a fireball and flies about Japan, destroying everything in its path, well, the film sorta becomes cool for a fraction of a second. And the ending, when the monster is attacked for the last time, well, I felt bad for the poor old space chicken! But the producers set it up so a sequel was possible. Where's the sequel? I want to see Guilala battle Baragon. BTW, the container which holds tiny Guilala at the end looks like a camping lamp.

The worst thing about THE X FROM OUTER SPACE is the music. Aside from the fun song, the actual music used when the monster attacks is basically the same thing played repeatedly over and over. It gets really tiresome.

Oh this one was pretty bad, flat and low budget the first 45 minutes, with the highlight being a sinister Pumpkin Pie in outers space(!!) harrassing our sturdy tinfoil ship and its crew. Then you get to the chase, with the giant Aquatic chicken/lizard/guinea hen letting loose on poor old back-lot Japan.

Bad miniatures, bad sound, the three Caucasians are guys we might be intended to identify with ala Raymond Burr in the first Godzilla, but don't you believe it-Franz Gruber looks like a 6 foot Gary Owens from Laugh-in with a Chermann accent, the other two are crosses between Buddy Hackett and Dick York. Peggy Neal has the Angie Dickinson bit down too.

Your Japanese cast are all kinda interchangable, none of them any threat to Tishiro Mifune's reputation. The F/X are lousy, the dialogue and dubbing grade Z.

My fave parts? Besides the attack of the giant Pie? Where do I begin? There's the demo of the Moon's low gravity, showcased by two actors on trampolines in space suits, the trampolines hidden behind a 'crater edge'. The flaming bubbles the monster spits out at the world's worst Tank and plane miniatures. The great chase where two guys in a yellow-green jeep, pulling a trailer carrying a 'cargo of radiation'-filing cabinet with a radiation insignia on its side-race '80'mph down the road, while the 200 foot(100 foot? seems to chage size...)monster kinda shuffles after them, one big rubber paw waving ineffectively at the guy holding the 'Cargo box' and the driver putting the pedal to the metal. You don't for a second believe that the shufflin' X from Outer Space can catch up and grab'em, but he/it/she does. Riot! You also have a funny scene where at Army Headquarters, they show a guy on a step ladder, moving a little X from Outer Space Magnet from one town to another along a wall-map...Oh Lord. That one had me rolling in the aisles.....Then there is the obligatory stomp through the city, where these rubber suited guys always seem to concentrate on poorly made power line miniatures-after which you get the grand finale. They spray some white foam on the X from Outer Space, from a series of straffing runs-the X nailing a few last jets for good measure before being encased in the goo and making like the melting Stay Puff Marshmallow man of Ghostbusters. They then fling the little white sporestone essence of the X into orbit around the Sun, while Peggy Neal and Co. wax philosophic about how Monsters have rights too...Very, Very hard to keep a straight face while watching this one. If MST3K never did it, you have to say what a shame. The movie was a target and then some for Cro and the boys.

What more is there to be said? Sheer incompetance, bad acting, poor F/X....this gets a star for chutzpah and another half for the Villainous Pie.

*1/2 outta ****-if you like bad rubber suited monster movies, this is for you. Just don't say you haven't been warned.

In letterbox, in a near-pristine print, in the original Japanese (with subtitles) I have to say this is a much better film than the one most of us saw on TV, back in the day.

For one thing, the line "Monsters have rights, too!" is never uttered. even in translation. (Although -- now that I think of it -- some people might prefer the dubbed version precisely because of its goofiness.) Of course, that's just the dialog, and even the most handsome presentation of this film can't obscure its marvelously wacky weirdness.

The miniatures and effects are kind of a mixed bag. The space-related sets and models are actually fairly well executed, but the monster effects are often sub-Toho, sometimes hilariously so, like when an absurdly out-of-scale F-101 Starfighter crashes into the X and just sort of hangs there for a few seconds. I think that's more from a lack of experience with kaiju flicks on the part of the studio and its technicians than penny-pinching. In the Criterion edition, at least, it's obvious that Shochiku put a not inconsiderable amount of money into this production.

Silly as it undeniably is, there are in fact some very creative moments in this movie, such as when the monster absorbs too much energy from a nuclear reactor and turns into a gigantic, red-hot sphere which bounces around Tokyo, wreaking fiery havoc until it plunges into a lake.

When you look at the competition, stuff like "Gappa: The Triphibian Monster" and "Yongary", in its very odd and quite unique way this is clearly one of the most entertaining of the Toho-wannabe giant monster films of the 60s.

In the 70's, as a kid when looking through the new TV Guide for the week's monster movies, the only thing as good as finding a Godzilla film or two was finding the Godzilla wanna-bes, like the undeniable classic "The X From Outer Space."

"X" is probably the personification of "cheesy Japanese monster flick." This monster is silly-looking, the FX are horrid, the music is terrible, and the film is a total blast. The "X" attacking planes and destroying buildings is just good and bad enough to make everyone happy.

The reason this film is a blast is because it has a lot of charm and heart. Those are a few of the ingredients that certain giant monster films made back then lack, and that's why they are unwatchable and truly bad, while films like "X From Outer Space" are bad but have enough of those things to make it fun. When a film lacks those things and is clueless, you get dreck like "Queen Kong" and "A.P.E."

There's nothing wrong with "The X From Outer Space" if you are simply into watching fun giant monster films with actors in suits (no computer crap) stomping on miniature buildings and swatting airplanes on wires out of the sky.

Which is where they seemingly pulled this mess. A space ship on its way to Mars picks up some spores on its hull. Of course, Man being Man, the spores are brought back to earth. Funny how guys returning from, say, Africa have to pass through Customs and then through a medical quarantine, but some space spore is carried right to Earth. Needless to say, contact with Earth's atmosphere causes the spore to become Guilala (where do they come up with these names?!), a cross between a giant chicken and a dinosaur. It is a lively monster, though. You can see the spring in its step when its trashing Tokyo.

The movie has the usual trademarks of Japanese monster films -- bad dialogue (Peggy Neal's "Monsters have rights" speech ranks up there with Peter Graves' "Man has a responsibility" speech from "It Conquered The World"); atrocious dubbing (why do they dub American actors' voices); cheap special effects, and unintentional comedy. For instance, Peggy Neal, an actress who unwisely used Japan as a starting point for a failed movie career, and a Japanese astronaut (Eija Okada, sadly far removed from brilliant films like "Hiroshima, Mon Amour") bounce across the moon. You can almost see the trampolines. Another time, as Guilala moves across the countryside, a soldier on a ladder moves a cardboard cutout of the monster across a map. It reminds me of "Varan, The Unbelievable" when the army comes up with a detailed miniature model of Varan for their strategy board only minutes after the monster first appears.

The miniatures tanks and jets are sub-par even for Japanese films. In one scene, a jet gets taken out and hits the water, looking about as large as an oil tanker.

The funniest part of the movie, aside from the annoying theme song ("Stars are our destiny..."), is the monster. It looks as if the monster suit is a size too large for the actor inside. Guilala shoots fireballs so fake-looking you can almost see the strings guiding them towards the tanks and jets. The monster smashes through the cheap cardboard city buildings a little too quickly (obviously the director didn't know that slowing the film speed a little would have helped). It's roar is, at first, laughable, then, finally, just plain irritating. There's a scene later where Guilala chases after a jeep hauling a trailer full of radioactive material. The jeep's doing about 80 and Guilala's running after it in slow-motion (not the slow-mo like "Six Million Dollar Man," but as if the actor was being told to walk oddly to avoid catching up to the jeep too quickly).

I saw this film on "Creature Double Feature," a hugely popular syndicated sci-fi/horror anthology popular in the 1970's and early 80's (wow, I'm getting old). I watched it just for the laughs when I was only seven, so that shows how bad the film is if it can't get past a child.