Tweet
Released by: Artsmagic
Released on: December 17, 2003.
Director: Hajime Sato
Cast: Teruo Yoshida, Tomomi Sato, Masaya Takahashi, Nobu Kaneko
Year: 1968
The Movie:
Goke - Bodysnatcher From Hell is one of those movies I remember seeing a few times as a kid on the Sunday afternoon movie. My local station would almost always show either a Japanese monster film or kung-fu film and it's these movies that shaped me into the fighting machine that I am today. But Goke stood out. It actually scared me. The Godzilla stuff, while it captivated me and kept me entertained for countless hours, never did that. Goke was creepier and weirder and its been stuck in my brain for a good many years now.
The film begins with a Japanese passenger jet flying through a bloody, orange tinted sky. Flight JA307 runs into problems though when the control tower radios them to alert them to the fact that one of the passengers may have carried a bomb on board. When one of the flight attendants begins searching the luggage, some of the passengers become upset but then an insanely bright light appears and knocks the plane out of the sky.
The plane crash-lands in a remote desert and its passengers and crewmembers are quickly running out of food and water. Soon though, things get even worse as one of the passengers plays host to a parasitical creature that enters his body by a very vaginal look wound on his head. Once this happens, he turns into a vampire that sucks all the blood out of his victims body and the only food around for him to prey on are the survivors of the crash.
As tensions grow between the survivors, more and more of them turn up dead as the creature stalks his way through what's left. This leaves them in a position where they'll have to either put their differences behind them and work together… or wind up a snack for the alien.
Goke is a trip. If Mario Bava had made a hallucinogenic Japanese monster movie, this is probably how it would have turned out, and parts of it did actually remind me of Bava's own Planet Of The Vampires. The color scheme, which uses mainly bold primary hues, ensures that the film maintains a striking sense of style throughout. From the opening scenes in the plain (set against a bloody orange sky) to the later scenes in the spaceship (where things take on a totally different color scheme), the film is painterly looking and very unique.
While the film didn't send my scurrying under the blankets like it did when I was a six-year old, it still creeps me out a little bit more than it should. There's something eerie about the way the gelatinous space creature oozes through the very female looking head wounds and takes over their bodies. The interior of it's spaceship is also very unusual and organic looking in comparison to most American sci-fi or horror films where everything is cold and mechanical looking and based on pure science. This ship is able to out do anything that the airplane can do and then some, even though it basically just looks like a glowing lump of goop.
Video/Audio/Extras:
Having only seen this on TV before (and then later on a bootleg tape which looked like it was taped off of TV), seeing the film in scope for the first time was a revelation. Every part of the frame is used to tell part of the story and the backgrounds and sets really shine through on this transfer. Aside from some brief muddiness in a couple of the darker scenes, Goke looks fantastic on this release. Print damage is very minimal and the colors look great. With the primary color scheme playing such an important part in the look of the film, I'm particularly glad that they get it right on this disc.
The film is presented in its native Japanese with typo free and easy to read English removable English subtitles. There's a bit of hiss at the bottom of the track but it's minor and for the most part the audio here is just fine with clean dialogue and some impressive moments where the sound effects kick in quite nicely. I'd have loved to have seen the films excellent soundtrack as a separate audio track (hey, I'm a sucker for stuff like that and this soundtrack is great!) but even mixed in with the dialogue and effects as it is here it still sounds quite good. Worth nothing is the fact that there are a couple of instances where some of the English spoken dialogue appears on the screen as burned in Japanese subtitles. It's mildly distracting, but it only happens a couple of times and really isn't a big deal at all.
Artsmagic have dug up a very spoilerish trailer, a couple of filmographies, and a lot of other titles available through their Shadow Warrior label.
The Final Word:
Goke - Bodysnatcher From Hell holds up just great. It's one of the eerier Japanese monster movies and Artmagic have treated this title right. It looks great, it sounds just fine, and the movie is well worth tracking down. EDITED TO ADD: Criterion Collection have this slated along with three other films for DVD release in their Horror Comes To Shochiku boxed set due 11/20/2012.