The Greater Agenda of That Which Creeps

     I wasn't high when I watched Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell, but at times I felt like I was.  A Japanese horror film from 1968, the movie seems, at first, like a typical monster movie with no significant depth.  Directed by Hajime Sato, the film finds time for UFOs, alien possession, a passenger liner crash, interpersonal dynamics of the crash survivors, marital woes of an arms dealer's wife, vampirism, the underhandedness of a scummy politician, hypnosis, the Vietnam War, a bomb threat, a political assassin, and apocalypse.
     After the crash, the assassin becomes the aliens' first victim, drawing him to their ship, where they split open his forehead to allow the entrance of a metallic blue ooze which proceeds to guide his subsequent actions.  The forehead wound, a gash extending from his hairline to the middle of his nose, resembles a vulva.  The entry of the alien into the man's head against the man's will is a rape.  For most of the movie, it's most appropriate that this slick, murderous assassin takes the role of the vampiric alien.  Every time he appears, wearing a white suit, he not only looks like the asshole his human character is, but also he's acquired something else, an evil beyond human, aliens determined to exterminate humankind and, for some reason, waste the entire planet.
     Much of the film deals with tensions on board the crashed plane.  Only about a dozen survive, initially, with a gradual die off throughout.  As they struggle, the passengers, led by the copilot and the stewardess, become increasingly maddened by their situation, exacerbated gravely by the lack of fresh water.  
     The film breaks down to just three people, two of them fleeing the scientist whose body gets possessed by the alien ooze after it exits the dying assassin.  What happens in the last ten minutes I'll keep to myself.  The ending surprised me a great deal and is the best thing in the film, although I enjoyed the performances of the two leads, Teruo Yoshida as the copilot and the lovely Tomomi Sato as the stewardess.  These two are the consistently decent people in the film, the moral center that, in light of the film's ending, may suffer from a most ironic irrelevance.
     I'd like to watch the film again, for I was deceived at first by what I thought was a typical plot, but soon it became an exceptionally weird movie with political, historical, and moral overtones.

                                                                                Vic Neptune
     
     
     
     

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