Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell

A Japan Air plane is cruising through a sky the color of a bucket of blood.  The jet is a kind of ship of fools -- in First Class, the passengers include a loathsome and corrupt politician (Mr. Mano), a sycophantic government contractor who is bribing Mano with both cash and access to his sluttish wife, a blonde American war widow whose husband died in Vietnam, a cynical psychiatrist and a impetuous, athletic youth as well as a few surly businessmen, and  a bland, mustachioed terrorist.  Birds keep thudding into the windows in the First Class cabin, bursting into bloody fans of feathers and gore.  The two pilots in the cockpit remark to the comely stewardess that the "skies have an unusual appearance" -- this is an understatement since the heavens seem to be hemorrhaging blood. Ground control announces that there is "probably" a bomb on the jet.  The steward starts searching through people's bags and finds one mysterious piece of unclaimed luggage that seems to contain a powerful acid.  The acid gets spilled, a gun is brandished, and, then, in the cockpit, the pilots are confronted by a glowing flying saucer, a sort of Peter Max colored psychedelic pumpkin with rings like Saturn.  Things aren't going well on this routine flight to Osaka and, next thing, we know the plane is skidding wildly through a sort of rocky badlands, shooting fire from its sides and careening violently through the stony wilderness before coming to a stop -- everyone is either dead or unconscious.  And this series of events is simply the film's prelude, the sequence preceding the garish titles that tell us that we are watching Goke, Body Snatcher form Hell.  

Goke is the second of four surreal horror films produced by Shochiku Films in the mid-sixties.  This picture is wildly ambitious -- a critique on civilization and its discontents with a rabble-rousing anti-Vietnam war message, atrocity footage tinted blood-red as well so that we don't miss the implications of the corpses, napalmed children, and mushroom clouds.  The picture's reach certainly outstretches its grasp and the movie is ridiculously cheap, with weird and utterly unconvincing special effects.  It must be said, however, that the director of this film (Hajime Soto) considered himself an artist and he develops his themes with histrionic and shrill assurance.  Furthermore, the bargain basement special effects epitomized by the model plane dangling mid-air in front of a mural of swollen and hepatic clouds have a curious poetic beauty -- it's all artifice, contrived delirium that is not without its lyrical effects:  one part of the big gravel pit where the plane has crashed has the curious property of raining oblong boulders the size of suitcases and filing cabinets down on those who venture into this terrain.  The camera is set directly under the avalanche of boulders which fall to the right and left or to the top and bottom of the lens.  The space ship is hidden in another corner of the canyon -- as you approach it, the gourd-shaped UFO girdled by orange rings begins to throb.  People drawn as if by mesmeric force into the flying saucer suffer a most peculiar injury:  their forehead splits wide open from nose to brow, admitting into their skulls a shapeless silver blob, an animate mass of quicksilver apparently invested with alien intelligence.  Instantaneously, the forehead, then, heals although disfigured by an engorged vulva where the blob-monster has penetrated the head.  People with this vaginal gash in the middle of their face become vampires who attack the survivors from the plane to exsanguinate them -- a feat that can be accomplished by some vigorous blood-sucking from the jugular and carotid arteries in about 25 seconds.  Sometimes, the exsanguinated corpses become hideous mummies with an eyeball in one leathery socket so as to better contrast with the opposing denucleated socket.  Some of these mummy-corpses are made of heaps of earth shaped like bodies -- when the skin wrapping these dirt corpses is flayed off the wind just blows the anthropoid soil away.  When one of the vampires gets lit on fire, the director doesn't have enough money to stage a full stunt body-burn scene -- instead, he just superimposes yellow flames over shots of the vulva-faced villains shrieking in pain.  These sorts of effects are metonyms -- the bare minimum to induce in the viewer a corresponding sense for what was intended by the film-maker but beyond his fiscal reach.  This kind of movie turns the audience into a co-director; we oblige the film's inadequacies by completing the effect in our imagination -- we fill in the rest of the effect, substituting in our reverie the whole for the unimpressive part displayed on screen.  There is something to be said for engaging the viewer's attention in this way.

Once the jet crashes, the survivors wake up to discover that they are beset by body-snatching alien vampires.  Instead of working cooperatively to defend themselves, the crash survivors swill whisky and bicker about the War in  Vietnam and man's inhumanity to man -- the psychiatrist helpfully tells the survivors that they will descend to a level "worse than beasts".  There's no water left -- at least, after the American war widow uses the last couple gulps to wash her face.  People keep wandering off to be eaten by the vampires.  Sometimes, the vampires can be killed (by fire or boulders plunging off the sides of the gravel pit); other times, it seems the vampires are invulnerable -- the rules keep shifting according the plot's vagaries.  In the end, the crash survivors are all murdered by one another or bled dry by the vampires.  One of the women stands atop a high ledge and announces in a sepulchral voice that she is inhabited by the spirit of the invading Gokemidore aliens who have come to Earth to destroy the warlike and primitive humans.  In the end, only the comely nurse and the ship's pilot are left alive.  After spending 80 minutes in the gravel pit, it finally occurs to them to climb over the rim of the excavation to see where the plane has crash-landed.  In fact, they are only a stone's throw away from a toll-highway.  But it's too late.  The Gokemidore have drained everyone of their blood and the corpses are stacked up like firewood along the roadway and near the toll-booths.  "Why did this have to happen?" the wounded pilot asks.  The film replies by showing another montage of carbonized corpses, war footage from Hiroshima it seems, and, then, big mushroom clouds all tinted bright red -- presumably mankind deserves this awful fate.  To underline the point, the film draws back from the island of Japan in the glittering seas of the East Pacific -- the camera tracks into Outer Space and, suddenly, we see hordes of orange psychedelic pumpkins (like something from the Beatles Yellow Submarine) pouring out of interstellar space to attack the blue orb of our Earth.