Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell (1968)

 

Director: Hajime Satô

Screenplay: Kyûzô Kobayashi and Susumu Takaku

Cast: Teruo Yoshida as Sugisaka; Tomomi Satô as Kazumi Asakura; Eizô Kitamura as Gôzô Mano; Hideo Kô as Hirofumi Teraoka; Kathy Horan as Mrs. Neal; Yûko Kusunoki as Noriko Tokuyasu; Kazuo Katô as Dr. Momotake; Hiroyuki Nishimoto as The Pilot

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #167 / An Abstract List Candidate

 

[Some Major Spoilers]

I am as surprised by the sense of disappointment I felt for Goke as much as admiration for what is an exceedingly strange film. This is in context that that immediately this Shochiku production is peculiar - your set-up has an airplane already flying through a blood red sky; birds splat against the windows violently as if in a form of avian suicide; there is a hit man on the plane, a traumatised American woman who has just lost her husband in the Vietnam War, and even a bomb invovled; and it is nine or so minutes in when the title card is shown, with Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell getting weirder as it goes along.

There is a sense I will grow in admiration of this production, which contextually we are talking about a weird horror sci-fi film, not the weirdest, which is a huge factor to consider however. It is a monster film set mostly in a very limited location, which reduces its scale and means there are scenes of a villainous figure strangling people, here to suck their blood, which is never really a good sign for me in a horror film usually. Where the intrigue is how odd the film is altogether; when the plane crashes, the cast are still alive but on a beach, but the hit man is taken over by an alien life form, set upon picking them off as humanity unravels with the tensions, something which could have just been a generic premise, but is played in odd directions here.

That it is a Shochiku production too is of note. If you think 1960s monster films from Japan, you would likely think Toho studios, which alongside the Godzilla films were making a lot in the kaiju and monster genre. Shochiku, famous the place where Yasujiro Ozu made most of his films for, invested their resources in 1967 and 1968 in four monster films, Goke arguably the most infamous. Note of well, by this time, Ozu died in 1963, and Shochiku were in financial turmoil to the end of sixties; even outside of Toho and monster films, you had Shintoho studios investing in horror films, and a studio like Nikkatsu who were (for viewers looking back decades later) in their prime from the late fifties and sixties with genre films between the "sun tribe" teen dramas to crime films. In desperation, Shochiku made a film this garish, perversely hallucinogenic. One, mind, shackled to a pulpy monster film plot, which is neglected as large portions of the film are a cast staged in a beach environment being picked off, but is still peculiar.

Where that becomes the springboard to madness can be felt immediately in the production design, including the heightened colours, with the set up of the Body Snatcher itself warning of how the film will be. Where when transfixed, the new host's forehead splits open, here with lovingly grotesque practical effects, to let blue alien slime enter against a nightmarish, bright colour lit background that burns the retinas. As much of the disappointment just comes from large portion of the film being this new entity just attacking the co-stars, not even with grotesque effect, but there is so much of the film which compensates for this.

The nihilism is such an aspect. Firmly wedged in its time period, Goke has a lack of love for humanity. Contextually made only a decade or so from the two nuclear bombs dropped on Japan, and explicitly talking of the Vietnam War, the aliens here see humankind having gone about killing each other and deciding to eliminate us all. A lot of the background details come forth in knowledge of this - the hit man who killed a British diplomat and the bomber both evoke how in the late sixties and seventies how bad terrorist and extreme left wing groups would become, and the Western character, played by American actress Kathy Horan speaking English and a regular in Japanese genre films from the period, becomes more and more traumatised with even a montage of real Vietnam War images shown to show a breaking point.

She eventually pulls a rifle to protect her and becomes like most everyone else. Humanity is not looked on well entirely as the film is about a group of (mostly) modern Japanese society, infighting when forced to survive. The army merchant and a politician he was trying to win over have mind games, also involving the merchant's wife and over a lack of water, and even the kind hearted psychologist has a glee in analysing the scenario in first person, even part of the pair who decided to sacrifice a member of the group to see how the Body Snatcher feeds. This is all enticing, all great with the style of the Japanese studio system where the production is well made. Many times the film looks closer and closer to falling off the edge into madness, and sometimes does, such as the Vietnam image montage. Again, however, all in the midst of an actor lurching at the cast to snuggle against their neck, which is rarely talked about when (rightly) praising the film, and leaves the film in an awkward dualism of interest.

When it is not this, like the alarmingly high risk of boulder crushings that transpire, or how discarded hosts hauntingly break down to dust, Goke is compelling. And thankfully, the ending is a killer. I have spoilers for a reason, and here the Earth does not leave this well, as the tone suggests. With people stood still, dead yet erect in position, on mass like statues, it was perfectly described as "if George Romero had directed Last Year at Marienbad (1961)¹", a perfect approximation of a finale for a film, with flaws, that is still a compelling oddity from Japanese cinema. Shochiku itself would not really stay in this direction. They would find instead success in Tora-san, a kind-hearted vagabond whose series of films lasted between 1969 and 1995, over forty films mostly helmed by Yōji Yamada and net them the financial stability they needed. Yes, that Yōji Yamada, whom most people in the West may know for a trio of period samurai films he made in the early 2000s like Twilight Samurai (2002).

Goke itself is a big reminder that these films, whilst some can be truly radical, were also meant to be pulpy genre stories to get patrons in. Something like Nobuo Nakagawa's Jigoku (1960), made for Shintoho, was made as a film to get patrons in but in its complex morality and weirdness is completely idiosyncratic. This in contrast is still a monster film at heart, and that is to be minded, that sometimes the films which get the notoriety or cult status are as much the little pieces or imagery which stick to the mind, rather than being radical in content. Goke has certainly made its reputation as much for the images of an infected host with a giant gap in their forehead as its content. It is also enticing to know that the other films Shochiku funded from this brief adventure of theirs - The X from Outer Space (1967), The Living Skeleton (1968) and Genocide (1968) - whilst potentially fraught with this duality are said to be just as bizarre. It entices them to me more now with mad radiance from afar because Goke, Boyd Snatcher from Hell felt like a fever dream.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Kitsch/Nihilistic/Psychedelic/Psychotronic/Weird

Abstract Spectrum (High/Medium/Low/None): None

 

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1) HERE