When Horror Came to Shochiku

This boxed set presents four late-1960s sci-fi/horror oddities—among the era's most bizarre and surreal films—from the Japanese studio Shochiku. The X from Outer Space (1967) opens on a Mars mission that encounters a glowing UFO and ends with a giant extraterrestrial waddling through miniature cities like a toddler on a sugar high. The director is Kazui Nihonmatsu, who also helmed the last entry in the set, Genocide (1968), an equally awkward sci-fi thriller involving killer insects, a downed U.S. bomber with a loose nuclear missile, and an arrogant American military trying to muscle its way into taking charge of the search. Although it's confused, sloppy, and silly (with a tasteless appropriation of the Holocaust for plot purposes), the film also creates an effective if disturbingly grim atmosphere of gloom and doom. The most famous movie in the collection is the psychedelic Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell (1968), directed by Hajime Satô, which follows the survivors of a plane crash in a surreal red wasteland, where they are being hunted by a bloodsucking alien (although the ravenous creature is no more deadly than the heartless passengers—a rogues' gallery of greedy and mercenary types ready to sacrifice anyone and everyone to save themselves). The black-and-white ghost story The Living Skeleton (1968), from Hiroshi Matsuno, completes the quartet, serving up a tale of revenge and violence that comes back to haunt a young woman in a seaside town. Seemingly tossed together on the fly, these are uniformly strange films produced with threadbare budgets and incoherent scripts. But genre fans may appreciate, making this a strong optional purchase. (S. Axmaker)