There are so many streaming services available now, so much content awaiting to become someone’s treadmill background noise, and I hear you asking, “Yes, but what kind of monster movies are on these things?” I’m glad you brought it up, entirely hypothetical person, because I plan to find out on this here website! I’ll be using some of my posts to explore the kind of monster-based content that is available to stream on all the less-than-major streaming services (because I already know how barren Netflix’s selection is), seeing who brings the most creature feature value. I think of this as a public service, but not necessarily the kind that is mandated by the courts.
First up, we’ll be checking out the Criterion Channel—home of film history, world cinema, mind-expanding arthouse classics, and a surprisingly robust collection of monster movies, including most of the Showa Godzilla films. They also have The X From Outer Space (AKA Giant Space Monster Guilala), the only kaiju outing from one of Japan’s oldest major film studios, Shochiku, and the missing final piece of the sixties Monster Boom that I began writing about last year. 1966/1967 were the years all the big players in Japanese cinema and television were trying to cash in on the love of rubber suit monsters—which also overlapped with the period where Shochiku was going hard into Science Fiction/Horror films, of which this was the first (the rest are also available on Criterion Channel.) As we saw in the other Monster Boom subjects, there was often an attempt for the non-Toho studios to find some way to distinguish their monsters from all the others, and it seems like the Sci-Fi angle is about as close to a trademark as X really gets…aside from its kooky monster.
Okay, that’s not entirely true—X also has a jazzy soundtrack throughout the movie, beginning and ending with pop music numbers about space and scoring all the actual scenes that take place in space with a jovial tune that just screams “this is the 1960s and you’re at a party.” There’s a very of-its-era vibe to the whole thing, a relic of the space age where just idea of humans travelling through the cosmic void seemed like the most exciting thing, and the possibility of turning the moon into some kind of resort for scientists (we get a scene where, for no particular reason, a bunch of suit-wearing astronauts bounce around for fun on the lunar surface—that’s how optimistic it is) which can even generate its own water from loose molecules and lets them grow giant vegetables. This is the stuff of retro-futurism, and while on a smaller scale than what we saw in Latitude Zero, the look, sound, and tone of the movie really brings that era to mind, and fits in well with a movie consisting primarily of adorable toy rockets careening in front of a starry background.
It seems that after building that moon base, with its era-appropriate interior design, humanity’s next plan for space conquest is Mars—but every mission that has been sent there has been sabotaged halfway through the voyage, and the government (which is based in Japan, but also employs a mildly international group of scientists) wants to figure out why. The crew of the AAB Gamma (a name you get to hear repeated a lot in this), led by Captain Sano, are the latest to take on the mission, and not far from the moon they discover the likely source of the previous failures: a mysterious UFO, which one of the crew compares to an omelette, but I kinda think it looks like a biscuit? Anyway, it messes with their controls and even makes their ship doctor fall ill, so they are forced to land on the moon and swap their doctor with one who spends the entire time whining about not wanting to be there. They encounter the UFO a second time, and in the aftermath they find their engines covered in strange spores, with a sample collected by the crew biologist Lisa and taken to Earth. She seems quite adamant that they must see how the spore reacts to Earth’s atmosphere, which it does almost immediately—something breaks out and melts through the floor, and seemingly within a few hours it shows itself to be a giant, robot-bird-headed monstrosity with roars reminiscent of an angry dog. After reducing a mountain to sulphurous mud, it begins a rampage through Japan searching for power sources, and the government and AAB Gamma’s crew musr figure out some way to stop what they are now calling Guilala. They just sort of say in the middle of a meeting that they’re calling it Guilala now, without explanation, and everyone accepts it. I guess it’s easier to talk about it if it has a name.
(As I learned, the name was chosen from children’s suggestions sent in to a contest.)
The solution, it seems, is to encase him in the material the spore was made of, which they call “Guilalalium” (they were on a naming kick that day), and can only be synthesized by Lisa in the vacuum of space. So while the AAB Gamma Crew is off doing that, you see Guilala swat planes, shoot fireballs at tanks, and kick through buildings (sometimes with less-than-good compositing effects); at one point he gets so juiced up from sucking the power from an atomic energy plant that he turns into a giant orange ball and bounces all the way to Tokyo. Based on how long his rampage goes on, you get the impression that he’s ripped apart most of the country by the time they have the Guilalalium weapons ready, but no one really reacts (except for the few scenes in the military’s war room, where they keep track of its movements with a small monster-shaped paper marker on a giant map of the country), so it must not be too bad.
The way the movie cuts back from scenes of people talking to scenes of Guilala’s stomping tour of Japan reminded of the similar scenes in A*P*E—obviously, this is much more competently-made, but it has a similar need to make us not forget about the monster for too long, although there really isn’t much done to differentiate the rampage scenes (aside from the bouncing ball part.) The number of short monster scenes also highlight the extreme lightness of the plot—even compared to something like Gappa, there’s not a whole lot going on here. The closest thing to subplot is a love triangle between the lead characters, with Lisa expressing romantic feelings towards Sano, who already has a love interest in Michiko, a scientist who works on the moon base (of course, having the American and the Japanese women vie for the Japanese guy has some nationalistic implications that I’m not entirely sure are intentional, although the ending where Lisa gives up might indicate otherwise.) This is set up in the first half to be something of a big deal (although oddly—we see Lisa give Michiko a pair of earrings, and after a conversation in the shower(!) they seem okay working with each other, so um, no hard feelings?), but after a certain point, it comes up so sporadically it barely impacts anything.
I honestly wondered how the movie was even going to get to ninety minutes considering how straightforward everything seemed, and answer was that the human parts in the second half—you know, the scenes in between the ones where Guilala is doing stuff—simply became a series of obstacles delaying things. Some of them are obstacles we see—the UFO again, a building collapsing on people, Guilala chasing a truck—while others, like how the AAB Gamma returns to Earth after we learn that the Guilalalium causes problems with the engines (they say they might have to put it next to the nuclear reactor, which would be dangerous—wouldn’t that make a tense scene?), are simply glossed over. After spending most of the first half going at a very leisurely pace, it gets very start-stop, and even the jazzy music comes and goes.
By the time they’ve finally, after much logjam, turned Guilala back into a tiny spore and launched him into eternal orbit around the sun, the final conversations during sunset almost seem to be wistful, like they hate seeing the giant bird-dinosaur-robot-thing go. You know, after he devastated most of Japan. We see his tiny rocket head off and another upbeat song plays over it. This is probably the defining feature of X From Outer Space: a general casualness to the whole thing, whether it be fun times on the moon or a colossal energy-eating monster knocking over buildings. It’s so carefree it doesn’t even feel the need to burden itself with too much plot or explanation, and just goes at its own pace. Otherwise, it’s not actually that weird or campy compared to its contemporaries, but seems comfy just to offer another piece of kaiju entertainment (and space age optimism) without much fuss.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 