Space Amoeba

Ishiro Honda – 1970 – Japan

A true curiosity from famed Toho Studios and its resident auteur Ishiro Honda; one of the few kaiju movies that didn’t revolve around the era’s star monsters like Godzilla, Rodan and Mothra.  Floating in space, a glowing, gaseous entity penetrates an automatic capsule and hitches a ride back to earth.  Landing on a remote Pacific island inhabited by a pagan tribe, the “amoeba” inhabits several marine animals, such as a cuttlefish and a lobster, morphing them into giant-sized monsters of the type we know to expect in these movies.  Strangely, the villagers seem to recognize the new space-sea-creatures as deities and know that the island’s native cave bats have the ability (and the motivation) to interfere with the alien’s brainwaves with their own radar capabilities.  Thus, the alien now needs to inhabit the body of a human in order to try and wipe out the bats.  All right, it’s not a story that makes a lot of sense, especially in print, but what makes the film interesting is its tone of fantasy and whimsy.  The Toho kaiju universe is one where you must never be surprised if a pair of miniature twin girls who speak in unison suddenly pop up, or if Godzilla and Rodan are kidnapped by humanoid aliens and brainwashed into attacking earth’s major cities.  Granted, some of the films – especially in the early 70s – degenerated into intolerably ludicrous kid stuff, but in the best of the oddball entries that Honda made – such as War of the Gargantuas (1968) or Latitude Zero (1969) – there is always an ingenuous charm mixed in with surprisingly sober implications about war, atomic energy, environmental pollution and imperialism; things in which the Japanese had a special interest in the post-WWII era.