Reviews of Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell 1968
-
Vagina headed vampires go!!!
This When Horror Came to Shochiku Eclipse series is pretty intense. I was looking forward to seeing Goke for years now. It was not a disappointment. It felt a lot like a Tezuka comic. It has a lot to say and is really entertaining to watch. I'm loving the aesthetics of these Shochiku films.
-
Criterion Eclipse Set #37: When Horror Came To Shochiku
----Just a few days before watching this, I watched Lifeboat, and I was saying to myself how I need to watch more movies like it, because I really enjoy films about paranoia, and how people go crazy within certain situations.
Then I watched Goke, and I loved it.
From the very beginning, you know something isn't quite right, with both the people, and the airplane itself. The special effects are pretty good and the suspense is alright, but it's the intense dialogue and the characters that say them that makes this movie a pleasure to watch.
-
Way better than you'd think, a "B" movie that actually has some pretty neat special effects that hold up and is interesting on a level other than pure camp. Good stuff.
-
2nd viewing, I saw this about 10 years ago (!) at the Grand Illusion in Seattle, and honestly, as amazing as it looks outside of a group setting it kinda drags in the last half. No real gripes, but I would probably wait to watch this with a crowd. However, I never thought a nice quality dvd of this would be made widely available. Other than some print damage (which looks great and give the film some texture/character), the dvd looks Fan-fucking-tastic.
-
Weird, psychedelic, highly entertaining proto-slasher from Shochiku. An airliner carrying a small group of Japanese and one gratuitious American war widow flies through the path of a flying saucer before crashing into a deserted area of Japan. After the crash, they are stalked by an evil alien blob who takes over its victims via a vagina-like slit on their foreheads and who is part of an invasion group who is planning to conquer the earth.
This is a pretty great…
-
Ethereal space allegory, made up of exasperated melodrama, political criticism and gooey space vaginas. It operates on a non-reality, with characters who are removed of humanity, reduced to devices and ideas, preyed upon by an enemy exposing the cracks in our ever so flawed system and diameters. Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell is a silly fun on the surface, but it covers an existential, nihilistic apocalyptic view underneath the creative effects and shock tactics.
-
Gooey horror courtesy of Shochiku, available now from Criterion's Eclipse sub-label. A fallen jetliner erupts into microcosmic squabbling between politicians and scientists, husbands and wives, delinquents and assassins, and even a vampiric alien creature that influences another great B-film, The Hidden. Hokeyness and hysteria abound, but the in-your-face antiwar sentiment, psychedelic visuals, and startlingly depressing and apocalyptic finale leave enduring impressions.
-
A Japanese b-horror movie. Nothing more, nothing less
-
This has the basic "don't trust anybody" plot structure of your typical disaster movie, but with vampire aliens and the melodrama cranked up to 11. GOKE is a treat (and the hysterical American woman is the cherry on top).
-
Cutting between an American woman swooning all over the place because her husband died in Vietnam and a succession of actual war photographs or filmed footage of mushroom clouds is a bit on the nose. (So's having half your cast spit out reams of dialogue explicitly explaining why war is bad.) Showing the human vessel of one of the mercury-colored space vampire blobs turn to ash and get blown away by the wind, however, is a much more effective way…
-
Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell is quite an interesting little piece of Japanese horror. The myriad passengers aboard a routine flight discuss life and politics in cool calm while the sky turns red and birds start killing themselves against the sides of the plane. Things get a little more hairy when the pilots discover a bomb threat has been made and have to check everyone's luggage. One thing leads to another, and the plane ends up crashing in a desolate…
-
(DVD) One of the crown jewels of this Eclipse set, GOKE is a fantastic mix of social critique and sci-fi wonderment. The social critique comes in the form of a microcosm that emerges from a plane crash. It's survivors - the chivalrous pilot, a heart-of-gold flight attendant, a sinister psychologist, a corrupt politician, an American woman mourning her dead GI husband, a young sun tribe turk, a diffident scientist, a manic in white who might be an alien - are…