The X From Outer Space - 1967

Released originally in Japan in 1967 (and then in USA in 1968) film studio Shochiku created a uniquely entertaining alien monster invasion movie with The X from Outer Space. The story centers on a band of space explorers who bring back to earth a dangerous, enormous galactic creature that teaches them all a few lessons about life.

The film has an earnest goofiness to it which outstrips the deficiencies of the story itself. The space craft AAB Gamma is a marionette (as is much else in the film) which encounters a baffling UFO phenomenon in the vicinity of Mars. This is an ongoing problem which has sabotaged earlier efforts by the FAFC space agency (which is run from a location in which scenic shots of Mount Fuji are always in background, which is incidentally the logo icon of the movie studio Shochiku).

When the hand-picked crew of AAB Gamma encounters the mysterious UFO, it literally looks like a chicken pot pie with inner glowing lights that taunt the earthling craft with a superior swooping speed that is in the unmistakable arc of a marionette being rapidly swung across the screen on wires (which may look familiar to sci-fi film fans: it happens in a similar way with much less skill in Ed Wood's famous Plan 9 from Outer Space).

Then "space spores" (they look like crystalline eggs) are left behind on the superstructure of AAB Gamma after the encounter with the intergalactic pot pie. Back on Earth, the eggs produce a 20-story tall super-'chicken' with red eyes and reptile skin. This monster has a horrible opinion of modern Tokyo architecture, and immediately goes on a rampaging critique that levels everything in his path.

An arsenal of toy tanks and missile launchers are deployed in The X From Outer Space to stop the chicken (it may be a distant relative of the equally un-horrifying space buzzard from The Giant Claw of 1957) but the toy arsenal has no effect beyond a spectacular fireworks show featuring multi-colored explosion clouds. Overcoming all opposition, the monster marches onward with a wobbling gate and rubbery feet vibrating on camera.

Guilala (the name of our fearsome chicken) eventually begins destroying nuclear power plants, and the energy released is then absorbed, making Guilala more powerful than ever. This also produces a change though, with the creature now exhibiting an entirely new talent which is to change into a glowing spherical ball that then travels across the countryside (a nearly identical mode of transportation used by Glenda the Good Witch in Wizard of Oz, and like the spherical space craft that haunted Allison Hayes in Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman).

Besides the monster mayhem in The X From Outer Space, there is a love triangle between the taciturn and always silent Captain Sano (Shun'ya Wazaki) and the two females of his crew, Michiko (Itoko Harada) and Lisa (Peggy Neal). Both girls adore him, which is a curiosity itself, as he only grunts at them in monosyllables, and the tension of which girl he will eventually choose is settled when Michiko stares at him for a long length of time as if this by force of will she can make him finally say something on the subject. It works, he quietly reaches over to hold her hand, and the matter is settled, and Peggy Neal will have to go on alone (she will be cast in the 1968 Kureji ogon sakusen).

Lisa summarizes her failure in love by saying:

"Guilala taught me an important lesson. Thanks to him I now realize that there's somebody else who loves Sano with all her heart."

How did Guilala do this? And why is there a loving affection by the cast for Guilala despite having flattened Tokyo and terrified it's citizenry with its zany powers? In the end, the tale seems to teach that it's hard to not love a giant reptile chicken.

The music by Taku Izumi is repetitious but a perfectly strange companion to the oddness of the filmed tale.

The film direction by Kazui Nihonmatsu battles a problem of limited movie sets, though he makes the best of things, with an off screen trampoline, for example, obviously working as the gravity-free special effect for the moon base scenes. Story-telling is direct and there's never any doubt about what is happening on screen, as bizarre as it may be.

The sum total of The X From Outer Space goes in two directions: it is either a one-of-a-kind Japanese monster movie, which (depending upon the sentiments of the viewer) rises to the level of a delightfully entertaining and demented tale of outer space. Or, perhaps The X From Outer Space is a botched effort at creating a sci fi film in a genre the crew producing it simply didn't understand.

AMAZON DVD Set: When Horror Came to Shochiku (The X from Outer Space; Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell; The Living Skeleton; Genocide) Criterion Collection

Original Page July 11, 2015 | Updated October 2020

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