Beauty and the Liquidman

I've got a Mill Creek box set of "vintage scifi", which includes a couple of Japanese films that were dubbed into English for release in the US. Recently, I watched one of them, a new-to-me film called The H-Man.

In Tokyo, some sort of criminal activity is going on as a man is parked and sitting in the car waiting before a policeman approaches him to see what's going on. After the policeman leaves, another man, Misaki, comes out from hiding as though he's going to put a suitcase into the trunk of the car. Unfortunately for him, he gets hit by another car before he's able to complete the transfer, which is actually a Macguffin full of narcotics. Misaki is presumably injured or killed in the crash, but when bystanders and the police come to help, he's gone, with just his clothes left behind!

The police are understandably somewhat baffled, and the best they can do is presume that Misaki somehow got out of his clothes and is a fugitive somewhere in Tokyo either naked or trying to get new clothes. Misaki has a girlfriend in Chikako, who sings at the nightclub, so of course the police question her and put a tail on her so that anybody trying to find Misaki will get caught up in the dragnet.

The researcher Dr. Masada has a different idea. Perhaps Misaki dissolved in the rain, which could be plausible if Misaki had been stricken by some sort of radiation. But apparently Misaki was never in any highly radioactive area, and look at all the people in Tokyo who were out in the rain storm and didn't dissolve. However, a couple of sailors are found, who had been on a ghost ship out to sea and saw a couple of colleagues get dissolved by something that looks like it could have come out of the movie The Blob. (In fact, The H-Man was released in Japan three months before The Blob had it's American release, but I'd bet the two movies were conceived independently.)

So now we know it's theoretically possible, but still it's unsurprising if the cops don't believe it. Besides, that would also mean this highly deadly creature has made its way to Tokyo, where it could wreak havoc since it's so hard to find until just before it's about to kill somebody for food.

Meanwhile, one of the gangsters looking for Misaki has showed up at Chikako's place and kidnaps her, taking her down into the sewers of Tokyo where their narcotics are hidden. Unfortunately, it's not far from where the creatures, now called the "H-Men", are nesting.

For fairly obvious reasons, there are comparisons to The Blob here, based on the compostion of the deadly alien creature and the special effects used to create it. However, both movies hold up just fine on their own. The H-Man is solid programmer-level science fiction from the 1950s, with a good enough plot and a reasonable conclusion. Of course it strains credulity, but all of those 1950s sci-fi movies did. This one isn't noticeably worse in that regard.

The one thing that might be interesting is to see the original Japanese version subtitled. I didn't noticed much in The H-Man that looked like it was added for an American audience the way Raymond Burr was inserted into Godzilla. But still I wouldn't be surprised if there are some differences.