Released in the same year as Varan, The H-Man sees director Ishiro Honda return again to ideas and imagery from Godzilla, just four years old at the time, beginning with more footage of a nuclear bomb test and another invocation of the Lucky Dragon 5 incident. What’s different here is that while the kaiju films visualized the fear of nuclear fallout and ongoing weapons testing through the creation of a walking natural disaster, this one is entirely human-based: men transformed into nightmarish new forms, completely unlike anything seen in nature (this is, in fact, yet another blob movie that predated The Blob—there must have been something gooey in the air in the late 1950s.) While treading some similar ground to other Honda/Toho genre films on the surface, the smaller scale and bizarre nature of the threat lead to something far different from the other monster movies of the Showa era.
As surprising as it sounds, a film cannot sustain itself on radioactive blob monsters alone, so this is something of a hybrid story, a melding of traditional genres that would be frequently employed in Toho’s creature features. In this case, a good chunk of the story is devoted to a group of detectives trying to bust up a gang and their drug-running operation—a case that begins with one of the suspected gangsters disappearing after meeting up with a cohort, leaving only his clothes behind. While the idea of a criminal running around Tokyo naked is unusual, it seems the police are more liable to believe that than any other explanation sent their way. The lead on the case, the no-nonsense Inspector Tominaga, decides to question the girlfriend of the missing criminal, Chikako, who spends her nights crooning at a hip night club. She becomes the centre of the case, as both the police and the other criminals try to grill her for more information on the whereabouts of her boyfriend, a question she can’t answer. Then the slightly meek but dedicated scientist Dr. Masada starts showing up during the detective’s investigations, claiming to be doing research pertaining to some strange discovery he’s made, all while other disappearances occur with similar Rapture-esque remains.
The leads are played by Akihiko Hirata and Kenji Sahara, one or both of whom appear in almost every genre movie Honda directed, and this movie sees almost a role reversal—Sahara is the playing the scientist, while Hirata (best known as Dr. Serizawa in Godzilla, with additional scientist roles in Varan and Terror of Mechagodzilla) is the Inspector. The way they interact is one of the more enjoyable results of the genre collision: Tominaga just wants to keep working on his gangster case, and is terribly irritated whenever this scientist tries to interrupt it with a monster movie. The first time they really seem to get along is when Masada convinces Chikako (Yumi Shirakawa, who has previously appeared in Honda’s Rodan and The Mysterians) to help identify other members of the gang to the police—but the only reason she does is because Masada is willing to believe her story of being threatened by one of the gangsters, and then watching him run out of her apartment and dissolve.
As Masada explains to Tominaga, he first got the idea that something strange was afoot after meeting two sailors suffering from radiation sickness, who tell the story of how a group of them encountered a derelict ship on the seas and, while exploring it and finding nothing but empty sets of clothes, were attacked by a sentient liquid that melts all organic material on contact. Maybe it’s just because I read a collection of stories by nautical horror maestro William Hope Hodgson recently, but the flashback showing the eerie abandoned ship and the unthinkable monstrosity aboard it really reminded me of that—and, of course, Honda would later direct Matango, based on one of Hodgon’s stories. The claustrophobic darkness of this flashback is one of the highly atmospheric parts of the movie, and one that really sells the horror of the premise.
Surface level similarities aside, there’s also a bit of Hodgson’s existentialist nightmare worldview in this story as well, just modernized: Masada’s theory is that exposure to radiation from an H-Bomb test on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific altered the physical form of a group of sailors on the ship, transforming them into the gelatinous “H-Man”, which then proceeded to melt everyone else on the ship. Giving the police, and the audience, a chance to see the startling aberrations at play here, Masada brings the inspector into his lab multiple times to demonstrate how a similar thing happens to a frog when also exposed to that level of radiation. In his mind, the transformation into the “H-Man” is the organic body’s way of adapting to a highly radioactive environment—emphasizing how the opening of the nuclear Pandora’s box has unforeseen, and honestly unforeseeable, consequences on all life on Earth.
Of course, just showing them that a frog will turn into a living liquid is not enough to convince the police that this is somehow involved in the situation (nor is showing them evidence that parts of the derelict ship from the sailor’s story has reached Tokyo Bay), and they go right back to setting up a sting operation at Chikako’s nightclub—a colourful setting that offers a stark contrast to the morose palettes seen elsewhere in the movie, and also provides the opportunity to stage two musical numbers—only to have it interrupted by the sudden appearance of, you guessed, the H-Man itself, which dissolves multiple people, including another detective. After that, and only after that, is Tominaga willing to prioritize the monster situation over the criminal one (although he did end up arresting most of the remaining gangsters anyway, so it’s not that much of a sacrifice for him.) This sequence, aside from showing off some of the more gruesome melting effects provided by Eiji Tsuburaya (most are portrayed as a slow deflation, but here we actually get to see flesh dissolve), also has the last gangster demonstrate some savvy by leaving his clothes behind so the police think the H-Man got him, too—although Masada tells them otherwise, because his Geiger counter detects no radiation in the clothes. It’s always nice to see character writing that cleverly utilizes the concepts it has thought up.
Aside from the dissolving sequences, the effects for the H-Man are really effective—in liquid form, you can see it oozing along walls, through windows, and across the floor, and they even find ways to make it turn corners and otherwise seem more intelligent in its movements. The faceless, relentless flow of a blob regularly proves to be among the most disturbing forms a monster can take, something that a bunch of different filmmakers evidently realized at around the same time (and that even William Hope Hodgson himself utilized, as you can see in the story “The Derelict”, appropriatley enough.) Every once in a while, the slime will take on a more humanoid form, what looks like a transparent phantasmal goo creature, which is a more classical effect but adds another rather ghostly image to the movie (especially during the flashback, when a group of these things appear on the deck of the ship.) The direction of both the effects and the human sections are effective, with Honda finding many great urban locales to film in—it’s a highlight of a later scene that may be the most moderately-paced car chase I’ve seen—and having the monsters only appear while its raining is a great extra touch (and something that would also be somewhat revisited in Matango.) Even the musical numbers are well-made, although I do find it amusing that Chikako’s classier ballads are often bookended by high-speed jazz orchestra (a style of music that is present throughout Masaru Sato’s film score) and some pretty provocative exotic dance numbers. The criminal and night club subplots may seem slightly extraneous at times, but they show how the Toho crew (including screenwriter Takeshi Kimura, who also wrote Matango and War of the Gargantuas) were becoming more engaged with the increasingly modernized Japan, a theme that would continue on into the sixties.
The finale allows Honda to shoot another classic evacuation scene, as the police and the scientists determine that the H-Man is lurking in the sewers of one section of Tokyo, and they plan on torching the entire sewer system to kill it once and for all. Meanwhile, that escaped gangster kidnaps Chikako and takes her to the sewers to grab his stash and then hightail it, but they find themselves trapped between the authorities and the pursuing blob monster. You gotta give it to him: even in the middle of a monster-based crisis, he feels the need to keep going with his criminal shenanigans. She is ultimately saved by Masada, who has fallen for her during his multiple interviews about people being dissolved by living liquid, and Tominaga, and they get out of the sewers just in time to see the entire waterline go up in flames, rather spectacularly. The screen engulfed by hellish fire, a narrator muses that if we continue to misuse nuclear radiation, the planet could become dominated by the new form of life—certainly not a new suggestion, especially not in the fifties, but one that was depicted rather chillingly here.
Honda and Tsuburaya made a handful of these non-kaiju genre pictures during this era of Toho, and in the case of The H-Man, it clearly allowed them to tackle some of the same themes from a different angle, and also deal with some very different sorts of visual effects. While the giant monsters became a symbol of widespread disaster (natural or otherwise), the mutants here are horror on a human scale, something lurking in our midst that reflects the way new technological dangers can alter us as well as our world. The new idea here is that we should not just be wary of everything being destroyed in one Godzilla-style burst, but also that we could more gradually decay into something inhuman—it may not have the immediate shock of seeing a city levelled, but the sense of dread remains.
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