The H-Man Appreciation Post (Halloween Special) [美女と液体人間]

What do I do for the Halloween season as a horror movie lover running a fansite about somebody who wasn't really in any horror movies? I talk about some horror-adjacent movies, I guess.

I'm going to structure this the same way I structured my Sanjuro post: since most of you have probably already seen The H-Man, I'll focus less on the film itself and more on things like merch, international releases, and other stuff that will hopefully be new to at least some readers. I would argue that The H-Man is the strongest contender for a horror label in the Transforming Human series, as the transformed humans in this film bear very little resemblance to humans anymore, whereas the antagonists of Secret of the Telegian and The Human Vapor do retain their human form.

This will be the first in a series. Throughout the month - in addition to regular, non-themed posts - I'm also going to cover Legend of the Cat Monster and maybe some Saturday Wide Theater stuff if I can find enough information about it. (I personally consider Godzilla a horror movie, but that's fairly controversial.) There's also episode 20 of Operation: Mystery, which is arguably a horror show more often than not, but I am currently unable to talk about that for secret reasons.

The H-Man was released to Japanese theaters on June 24th, 1958. It shares a lot of its DNA with Godzilla, having also been directed by Ishirō Honda and including explicit references to the Lucky Dragon no. 5 incident, but whereas Godzilla presents nuclear testing and weaponry giving rise to an external threat, The H-Man looks at the possibility of humanity itself becoming infected by the aftereffects of nuclear power. Honda visited Japan's first nuclear reactor (the now-defunct JRR-1) and interviewed a scientist from the University of Tokyo's nuclear science department as research for the film.

It's one of my personal favorite tokusatsu movies. It's entertaining, fast-paced, and genuinely scary at times, but it also has that Honda introspection that makes it stick in your brain long after watching it. I talk about it on my film review blog here.

The film was actually based on a story by a contracted Toho actor, Hideo Unagami, but Unagami passed away the year prior to filming. Unagami would write scripts on the side and bring them to Toho's planning department, and got the idea for a story about a new human born from the radiation of a hydrogen bomb during filming of The Mysterians. Takeshi Kimura took Unagami's manuscript and finalized it into a script for The H-Man.

As per Kenji Sahara, the climax of the movie was filmed in an actual sewer and apparently smelled as bad as one would expect. (I always get a kick out of seeing Akihiko Hirata hanging around down there in a plastic jumpsuit with a full suit and tie under it.)

American lobby cards for this film fetch semi-ridiculous prices, for some reason.

The film was first screened in American theaters a little less than a year after its original release, on May 28th, 1959. Columbia Pictures handled the release and surprisingly they still retain distribution rights to the film to this day, after having renewed the license in 1987. I haven't seen the Columbia dub, but as I mentioned in my review, it apparently removes all mention of the "H-Men" retaining their human memories after they've been transformed, which, to me, ruins a lot of the film's impact. From what I understand the American cut also guts the special effects to a large extent. You can read more on the differences between the two cuts of the film here.

Other theatrical releases of the film extended to twelve more countries over the next four years.

West German poster - Google Translate says the title is "The Terror Creeps Through Tokyo"

French poster included with the leaflet inside a Japanese laserdisc release of the film

Speaking of fetching insane prices, there is a sequel manga that was released shortly after the film itself. This has been translated in full over on Toho Kingdom. It isn't fully scanned, but the translation does include a selection of images from the manga, and you can check out some more on this Mandarake listing. The protagonist is a youngish boy as per shounen manga tradition, but Chief Inspector Tominaga actually does have a decent role in it. There's also baseball, and a white guy with a fearsome mustache.

Nicholas Driscoll from Toho Kingdom apparently bought this for $800. I feel solidarity with him as I myself have done some questionable spending lately.

There is technically another manga, but I don't think you're ready for it. It appeared in the January 1971 issue of Saturday Manga. The best I can figure, a man drinks some kind of whiskey that H-Man-itizes him, a woman kisses him and somehow... swallows him... and then coughs him out... but it all turns out to be a dream sequence in the imagination of a woman who is being given CPR after nearly drowning?

Let's move on to merchandise... if you really, really need your own liquid human, you have some options. CAST has, of course, produced an ornament of one of them, which comes packaged with the poor frog who gets liquified in the film:

That's the deluxe version, though. If the frog weirds you out, there is a version with just the human.

Hang him on your Christmas tree. You must.

There are also more H-Man sofubi than I expected. There exists a possibly unlicensed garage kit that comes not only with a humanoid H-Man but also one of the dancers in mid-H-Man-ification:

This picture really gives off a vibe, doesn't it

 

Or you can get a more normal-looking, run-of-the-mill (and licensed) sofubi that you don't have to assemble and paint yourself.

We're going to end our H-Man journey here, since there's not a lot out there in the way of merch and fun stuff. I think it would be cool if somebody like Super7 did Transforming Human figures, but that feels like it's probably never going to happen.

You can watch The H-Man right this instant on various streaming services (Tubi, Amazon Prime, etc), but unfortunately all legal online streaming platforms have the shortened English dub. However, Columbia Pictures' "Icons of Sci-Fi Toho Collection" DVD, which packages this film with Mothra and Battle in Outer Space, appears to include both the original and the dub, and is pretty cheap and easy to find secondhand. (Interestingly, the back of the box covers all its bases by referring to Ishirō Honda using both his real name AND "Inoshiro".) Mill Creek and Eureka have released it on DVD with subtitles as well and both times it is packaged with Battle in Outer Space.

Tune in next time for more vaguely spooky films...

力道山・男の魂 / Rikidozan: Otoko no tamashii / Rikidozan: A Man's Spirit

Release date: August 29, 1956
Director: Seiichiro Uchikawa
Studio: Distributed by Toho, produced jointly by Wakatsuki Pro, Takimura Pro, and Rikidozan Pro.
Cast: Rikidozan, Keiko Kishi, Ichirō Arashima, Hisaya Morishige, Mike Mazurki, Mariko Miyagi, Yasuko Nakata, Helen Higgins, Akihiko Hirata, Chiemi Eri et al.
Availability: VHS release, no other home media. Now available on archive.org.
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I am so, so utterly delighted to bring you this post today.

Rikidozan: A Man's Spirit is a docudrama about Rikidozan, the "Father of Puroresu", who was quite famous in the Showa era and did a lot to popularize pro wrestling in Japan after the war, but died very young after a street fight. (You'll have to forgive me because I don't know much more about him than that.) More importantly for our purposes, Akihiko Hirata is in it. This is in fact one of the most obscure titles in his filmography that has a home media release.

That home media release comes in the form of a run of VHS tapes that Toho Video put out in the late 1980s. This film has never been released to DVD or streaming, and I've heard that as of a 2014 theater screening, the original film stock had degraded so badly that it was almost entirely pink. So, this movie runs the risk of being lost to time as the materials it's stored on continue to degrade, unless somebody were to obtain one of those (fairly rare) VHS tapes and digitize it.

So I did that.

It was, all things considered, a pretty risky endeavor. I had no guarantee that the tape would play or, if it played, that the image and sound quality wouldn't be abysmal. But it was worth the risk. After waiting a solid two months, I had a 40-year-old ex-rental VHS tape on my hands that had survived both Japan's typhoon season and the tropical storm that hit my area on the day it was delivered. And did the risk pay off?

It sure did. And I have the archive.org link to prove it.

Let's take a look at it with screenshots. This person wrote a much nicer and more detailed summary that Google translates pretty decently; read it for more plot information.

The film opens with a bunch of kids doing chanbara stuff on a beach when one of them notices a pair of sandals that turn out to belong to Rikidozan. We get some cute scenes of him flipping the kids around, letting them bury him in the sand, general antics. It's nice, I like it. I don't know that there's much of a plot to this thing, honestly. It's mostly just a movie made for people who want to see Rikidozan. (And me.)

big dude isn't he

Ichirō Arashima's here too. He plays Riki's manager. He gets fired after a noodle dispute, gets drunk at a bar, tries to weaponize his manager status for clout, and they threaten to call the police on him.

Bartender played by Hisaya Morishige, of Shachō fame

me watching this movie

A driving point of conflict throughout the film is that a teacher named Shirai thinks Rikidozan is a bad influence on children because he's too violent. After a lot of wrestling and a lot of miscellaneous scenes of huge sweaty men in the shower and the gym and whatnot, Shirai comes directly to Rikidozan's office. She lets him know that a kid injured his classmate bad enough to put him in the hospital by using one of Riki's signature karate chops. Her and Riki visit the injured party and the fact that a child was hurt in a way that had anything to do with him does seem to upset him.

Rikidozan's main rival in this is an American wrestler named Max, played by Mike Mazurki, another person I don't know anything about, and... is... is that the big guy with the hammer from Yojimbo?

Max promises Rikidozan a match - framed as a kind of "East vs. West" thing - as they're both some of the top wrestlers from their respective countries. Max apparently killed somebody (maybe) during a match, and this earned him a reputation, as well as the nickname "Murderer". 

Max responds to questions about his opponent's death with "I guess he was a bit unlucky." [cracks knuckles ominously for a solid 15 seconds] "But that RARELY happens."

Riki and his fanmail

At this point in the plot some shady characters enter the picture who are trying to secure a deal with the yakuza(?) whereby they would gain rights to a bunch of properties in Tokyo if their side wins at gambling. Various ideas are floated until the idea comes up that they could bet on pro wrestlers... the Rikidozan vs. Max match, specifically. The thing is: Max is apparently going blind.

Thiiiiiiis is where Hirata's character finally comes into play. He plays Max's doctor and the only person who knows anything about what's wrong with him. The side who wants Rikidozan to lose kidnaps him and tortures him for information on anything that could be used to blackmail Max (who has been told he'll be fine for long enough to have the match). After they learn his secret, they go to Max and use it as leverage, along with a huge amount of cash, gold, and jewelry, to try to convince him to kill Riki, promising they'll take care of him after he goes blind if he can win the match for them. We don't see Hirata's character (named Fujimura, same as in Varan) again after this; he was really just a plot device.

I guess the point of this is to contrast people who fight dirty against Rikidozan who supposedly does not; he stays cool even in the face of Max swearing he'll kill him the next day. We get a scene where he tells a bunch of kids not to get too violent because that's not what pro wrestling is about. He tells them he won't use karate chops anymore now either.

I won't post screenshots of the final fight. You can go watch it for yourself now if that kind of thing interests you, I really don't care one way or another about wrestling so I don't even know what parts I should be screenshotting or not. Hisaya Morishige gets in the ring, though, absolutely ready to throw down.

Riki wins his fight fair and square, but that means Max is useless now, so the goons in the audience, who have smuggled in a gun, shoot him. He survives long enough to give some final words to his wife and to reconcile with Riki, thanking him for giving him an honorable final match.

So. I can now add "wrestling propaganda movie" to my list of things I've sat through for Akihiko Hirata. Okay, maybe "propaganda" is a little harsh. But this is a movie about how good and noble puroresu is supposed to be, and it props up Rikidozan as an exemplar of that, and it will not hear any contrary opinions. It is, as I said, a movie for people who want to see Rikidozan. I can imagine a lot of young boys probably watched this and thought it was cool. I have no problem with that. It's just a little silly. And I liked it. I hope this was as fun for you as it was for me, because for me it was very, very fun.

My apologies that the title card is cut off in the recording, by the way; I didn't realize I had to press "start".

江戸川乱歩の美女シリーズ: 湖底の美女 / Edogawa ranpo no bijo shirīzu: Kotei no bijo (1982) / Edogawa Ranpo's Beauty Series: Beauty at the Bottom of the Lake

Release date: October 23, 1982

Director: Umetsugu Inoue

Studio: Shochiku/TV Asahi

Cast: Yumiko Nogawa, Chiaki Matsubara, Akihiko Hirata, Kojiro Kusanagi, Emiko Yamauchi, Tatsuhiro Itō, Yoshio Inaba, Masaya Takahashi et al.

Availability: Full series available on DVD; it also has been aired on Shochiku Tokyu every Sunday since April of this year as part of a celebration of Edogawa Ranpo's birth. Available on U-Next (Japan-only).

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Edogawa Ranpo's Beauty Series was a series of TV movies that ran for a remarkable 17 years (from 1977 to 1994) as part of TV Asahi's Saturday Wide Theater timeslot. As the title implies, the series adapted works by the author Edogawa Ranpo (the more famous pseudonym of Tarō Hirai). This one in particular is based on "The Lakeside Pavilion Incident". For a TV movie, it's surprising that this is relatively accessible; Hirata worked extensively in television after he left Toho in the late '70s, but the vast (and I do mean vast) majority of TV movies from that time are virtually lost media. Apparently the series takes a dip in quality after this film, which was the last one directed by Umetsugu Inoue. The soundtrack was done by acclaimed and prolific composer Hajime Kaburagi.

This will contain full spoilers, so beware. As I always say, all images are copyright Shochiku, and I claim no ownership - I'm just the weirdo with the DVD. Here are some scans of the booklet. This is the 2002 King Records release.

I always find it really interesting to hear what movie/series people use when they say "Akihiko Hirata from[...]" since he was in SO much stuff. In this case, the booklet chooses to mention his recurring role on Taiyo ni Hoero!, which is virtually unknown in the West.

Detective Akechi (Shigeru Amachi's character throughout the series) finally gets a vacation at a picturesque hotel on Lake Shirakaba with two characters who I assume are from earlier episodes. At the station, he meets up with Hirata's character, a finance lawyer named Kamimura, who he apparently is familiar with. They greet each other and then part ways.

At the center of the plot is a painter named Yosui and his family problems. This seemed like it was on track to becoming an inheritance drama, but it gets a little wacky - you'll see.

All the players end up - in classic murder mystery style - staying in the same hotel: Akechi, his friends Fumiyo and Kobayashi, Kamimura, Yosui's model Yukari, and Yosui himself, as well as another painter, Kaga, and his model, Maki. Very abruptly, Yosui walks in on Shinobu in bed with her younger lover, Nozaki, also a pupil of Yosui's. We learn that Yosui contrived this as a setup, convincing Nozaki to sleep with her so that he could get a speedy divorce. Nozaki's condition for doing this was that he would be allowed to marry Yosui's daughter Yoko, but she eventually dumps him.

There's a lot of girls in swimsuits in this.

After a rapid-fire argument that I honestly didn't catch a lot of, Yoko discovers a kokeshi doll with a skull carved into it in her bed. The booklet says that this "foreshadows a murder"; I'm not sure if that means the kokeshi doll is a recurring motif throughout the Edogawa Ranpo's Beauty Series films or just this one. Yoko runs to Yukari and the two remember that they conveniently know a detective staying in the same hotel - no vacation for Akechi after all. 

Just after the girls ask Akechi about the doll, things get even more complicated: while sitting down to watch a televised live performance by the Marine Girls (an underwater dance troupe also responsible for some of the diving scenes in the film), Akechi and friends witness a corpse at the bottom of an aquarium. It's Yosui's daughter Yoko, and the news finally sends Yosui - who had a weak heart - over the edge. It doesn't kill him, but he's incapacitated.

Other detectives interview the security guard/aquarium maintenance guy who was overseeing the monitors - he had taken sleeping pills on the job and wasn't watching. By the time he got back to his post, the body was already there. A second hotel worker attests to this. Akechi also talks to Yukari about the doll, but pretty much just tells her to take it to the police. (He's playing it cool, but you can tell gears are turning in his head.)

🤨

The detectives also question Shinobu (with Kamimura assuming lawyer duties), and as soon as she namedrops Akechi, the whole mood in the room changes - oh, Japan's #1 detective is in the area? We gotta get him on this! 🎶Zubatto sanjo, zubatto kaiketsu!🎶 (Sorry, I hear somebody say "kaiketsu" and that's all I think of.)

love seeing him play lawyers. putting that law degree to good use.

Akechi gets everybody in a room and looks into their alibis. Shinobu is coy about it in a way that screams "I have something to do with this", Kamimura is offended to even be asked, and I didn't entirely catch what Nozaki says but I think he claims he was alone. Akechi shows the kokeshi around and nobody says they've seen it. We move into a montage of other interviewees describing what they saw of Yoko prior to her death.

Amachi is wearing this sweet jacket for most of the film

As abruptly as we're shown Shinobu and Nozaki together, we're VERY suddenly and completely out of nowhere shown Shinobu and Kamimura in bed together as well. Oh, alright then. 

And then - oh.

Oh, okay?

Well, now Maki's dead.

Fumiyo and Akechi have another chat with the aquarium guy about Maki's murder, and they watch Yukari on the monitors as they talk - oh. Oh no.

Yukari survives her skullman encounter and we load up the funky Hajime Kaburagi score as Akechi pursues the killer(?). This of course goes nowhere. Too early in the movie for a big reveal like that.

Akechi has been, in the background, nonchalantly questioning people about this print of one of Yosui's paintings that the aquarium guy has in his office. With his expert detective skills, he intuits that it has to be relevant to the case. He enlists Fumiyo and Kobayashi to find as much information about the mountain as they possibly can, and they learn that Yosui himself is somehow involved with events that transpired there in 1961. Akechi goes so far as to travel to the mountain... but so does the killer!

Akechi goes missing after an attempted murder by rockslide, and we transition back to the hotel, where we see an unknown figure deposit another skull doll on Yosui's bed and then turn off his oxygen while his attending nurse naps. Unfortunately for his would-be murderer, he still doesn't die from this. The other detective, in Akechi's absence, grills a room full of murder suspects quite dramatically.

Yosui, still recuperating, is wheeled into the room and tells his story in front of everyone. 20 years prior, on the mountain from the painting, Yosui took shelter in a hut occupied by a woman and her daughter during a bad storm. Yosui raped the woman, whose daughter turns out to be Yukari. So Shinobu was not Yoko's biological mother.

So, no matter how suspicious Shinobu and Kamimura looked, no matter who was sleeping with whom, it was all a bunch of good old red herrings. Yukari had the motive. It looks like it's her. But here is where it all takes a hard left turn. Now Sanzo, who I've been referring to as "aquarium guy", points to Yosui and says "that man isn't Yosui"! "Yosui" reveals that Sanzo is Yukari's father! "Yosui" takes off his fake facial hair and wig! And begins to peel off the mask he'd been wearing!

I had been a little bored at the beginning of this film but I will admit this moment made me go "oh NOOOO!" out loud.

Akechi Columboes his way through an exposition dump: Yukari's mother killed herself following Yosui's assault, leaving Yukari alone, and Sanzo had to witness it all. Now Sanzo is the one with the motive, and we see it all revealed: he killed Yoko, pretended to be sleeping, dumped the body in the aquarium, and then killed Maki because she saw him do it. He also pretended to attack Yukari in the skull mask to throw Akechi off. But in a final dramatic moment, Sanzo shoots himself through the heart rather than be arrested for his crimes, and Yukari kills herself in the same lake her mother did, unable to live with herself.

So that was a wild ride. I can't compare it to other episodes of the series since I haven't seen any, but I can believe that this was considered the peak of it.

I tend to associate Hirata and Amachi with each other, since they were both of the same generation and both died very young within about a year of each other, but they really didn't work together very often at all. I like Shigeru Amachi as well, his cool-guy persona really works for this role, but I'm not sure how I felt about his younger assistants - they seemed like they were just there for audience relatability, or something. I would also imagine the plot was changed drastically from the source material, since so much of it relies on things like television monitors that would not have been around in the 1920s.

I had a lot of fun with this overall; it was a little cheesy but in all the right ways that make a murder drama a good time.