*****
Director – Ishiro Honda – 1958 – Japan – Cert. X – 86m
The H Man (lit. Beauty And The Liquid People) was scripted by Takashi Kimura, who, as Jasper Sharp notes in the accompanying booklet, wrote monster movies for Honda where the monsters were liquid, gas (The Human Vapor, 1960) and mutant man-mushrooms (Matango, 1963). All these can be read as the elements constituting the clouds – or mushroom clouds – of nuclear bombs dropped on Japan or tested near it.
Yet after opening with nuclear explosion stock footage, the film swiftly morphs into a police procedural in which various characters mysteriously disappear… [read more]
Over at All The Anime, I review Eureka!’s Ishiro Honda Blu-ray double bill of The H Man and Battle In Outer Space.