"The frog has transformed into a completely different liquid organism": The H-Man

Info
Also Known As: Beauty and the Liquid People (original Japanese); The H-Bomb Monster (Brazil)
Director: Honda Ishiro. Screenplay: Kimura Takeshi, from a story by Kaijo Hideo. Director of Special Effects: Tsuburaya Eiji. Composer: Sato Masaru.
Runtime: 87 minutes.
Release Date: June 24, 1958

What’s It About?
A wanted member of a drug gang disappears, leaving his clothes behind; to all intents and purposes, he seems to have melted away on the spot. This may be exactly what happened, as the man’s lounge singer girlfriend Chikako (Shirakawa Yumi) sees another mobster who had come to intimidate her meet the same fate. Naturally, the police suspect her of lying and hiding her boyfriend, but Dr. Masada (Sahara Kenji), a university professor working with radiation, proposes a bizarre theory: the murderers are H-Men, former humans turned into gelatinous carnivores by exposure to nuclear fallout. As evidence mounts in favor of the H-Men’s existence, the creatures seem to be converging on Tokyo, setting the stage for a three-way  showdown with the police and the gang members trying to silence Chikako!

Monster Appearances: No giant kaiju appear here, but the human-scale H-Men are threatening enough. An H-Toad, a lab toad with the powers of the H-Men, also appears, though not nearly enough considering what an awesome idea that is. Fingers crossed for an H-Toad movie someday.

Childhood Memories
This is another one I never actually see as a child, but read about on Toho Kingdom and similar sites. I finally watch it for the first time as an adult on April 23, 2019, near the end of my college semester in Dublin. I find it a mixed bag, though I ultimately opt for a positive rating and a review that simply states that the film is “wonderfully creepy in spots!”

Analysis
Like Warning from Space, The H-Man is not a proper kaiju movie; it is Honda’s first monster film where the threat is human-sized. The H-Man is in fact the first of Toho’s so-called “Mutant Trilogy”, consisting of films focused on mutant humans with fantastical abilities rather than giant monsters. Despite the lack of city-stomping, the Mutant Trilogy comes from the same creative production line as the kaiju films and sees the further development of several shared themes, so on the blog they go. (I was considering covering all three films in the same post, but it felt wrong to skip a major step in the continued evolution of Honda Ishiro’s tokusatsu entries; he would make two more science fiction pictures between The H-Man and the conclusion of the trilogy in 1960.)

That said, The H-Man does demonstrate kinship with a giant monster movie (of sorts) from the same year: 1958’s all-time b-movie classic The Blob, directed by Irvin S. Yeaworth, Jr.. Both feature a gelatinous monster (or monsters, in the case of the former) that feeds on human flesh. Neither film was inspired by the other, although the sewer sequences in both of the later Blob films (one a sequel, the other a remake) are remarkably similar to those in Honda’s film. Unlike the iconic, blood-red Blob, the bluish-green H-Men (or Liquid People) cannot grow in size; they make up for the disadvantage by being much creepier. Though the Blob is a mighty threat in its own right, Yeaworth’s tone threads the line between suspense and a slightly tongue-in-cheek sensibility. Whereas the H-Men are deadly serious threats, silent predators whose absorption of their prey is genuinely grisly for a 1958 film; Honda elides the most graphic parts of the deaths by staging most of them in low light levels, but that only leaves more to the imagination. Indeed, the sequence where we first meet the H-Men, an extended flashback where sailors explore an irradiated, abandoned ghost ship, is one of the greatest sequences in Honda’s career, displaying a masterful control of tone and atmosphere. I’m dead certain that if I’d seen The H-Man as a child, it would have scared the crap out of me.

What’s interesting is that The H-Man isn’t even primarily horror, instead spending most of its time as an ostensible crime film. For the first time in one of Honda’s science fiction films, the majority of the cast aren’t playing ostensibly ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events, but recognizable genre stock types. You have the squad of police detectives, led by Hirata Ahikiko’s skepticism-prone Chief Inspector Tominaga; you have the drug gang members, whose most notable member, Uchida, is played by rising Toho star Sato Makoto; you have Chikako, a lounge singer with a heart of gold who’s in too deep with the underworld. The only major character who isn’t a mainstay of crime thrillers is Sahara Kenji’s dorky scientist Masada, and the film derives mild comedy from his attempts to explain to the other characters that no, they’re actually in a science fiction movie.

This marks a significant shift in the basic operating principles of Toho’s monster films. Previously, they had functioned as, in essence, disaster films, focused on human characters ostensibly patterned after real life as they are suddenly thrust into an extraordinary situation. But The H-Man revisits the weird mid-film detour into crime thriller territory from Godzilla Raids Again and builds an entire film out of that mash-up of genres. Even the score by Sato Masaru (whose work for Toho’s monster films really starts to come into its own here) evokes a jazzy, seedy atmosphere when it isn’t focused on spooky horror cues.

Granted, the genre juxtaposition isn’t entirely smooth. Honda’s direction, while miles more dynamic and successful in its use of the widescreen frame than in The Mysterians, is visibly stronger in the suspense and monster-focused segments of the film than in the scenes that focus as, essentially, a police procedural. Nor does he seem very comfortable with the more prurient aspects of the crime genre, such as the male gaze-inflected treatment of scantily clad nightclub dancers, unless those moments are part of a character beat.

On the other hand, one such moment, where Chikako closes the door to her room to prevent waiting police officers from spying on her while she changes, seems to fit screenwriter Kimura Takeshi just fine. A staunch leftist, Kimura seems to relish the chance to make the police, ever the enforcers of the status quo, come across as assholes: leering toward Chikako and the nightclub women, racist towards a suspect from one of the countries Japan victimized (one of the detectives throws a Chinese newspaper in front the gang member, even though he’s Korean), generally rough and ungracious toward those involved in the case, and skeptical of the fantastical explanations for events long after it stops making sense to disbelieve them.

It occurs to me, writing this, that one of the strangest plot points in the film may even be an incredibly straight-faced joke at the police’s expense. It turns out that Masada and his fellow scientists, led by one Dr. Maki (Senda Koreya - an actor with a fascinating life story), can in fact reproduce the conditions that created the H-Men in laboratory conditions. In order to persuade Chief Inspector Tominaga that the H-Men could be responsible for the disappearances, the scientists demonstrate the creation process by bombarding toad test subjects with radiation. The result is the creation of an H-Toad, a liquid organism that preys on other toads. Leaving aside the mind-boggling implication regarding both the common effects of radiation and the laws regulating scientific experiments in the Toho universe, it is telling that Tominaga’s reaction to witnessing none other than the transformation of one living thing into another is along the lines of “Yes, but this doesn’t prove anything regarding the case.” Keep in mind, Tominaga is by far the most sympathetic police character in the film. (Also, I reiterate what I said in the Monster Appearances section at the top: we need an H-Toad movie, stat. Especially if the Liquid Toad is giant-sized in this case.)

In spite of Kimura’s apparent enjoyment from lightly subverting the police procedural template, his writing doesn’t quite make the different genre elements gel any more smoothly than Honda’s direction does. As one could expect from having watched one of Toho’s previous monster films, there is earnest discussion from the scientists about how the H-Men represent the threat that nuclear weapons pose to humanity, and a film-ending speech from Dr. Maki that almost precisely replicates Dr. Yamane’s from the end of Gojira, warning that even though the H-Men have been defeated, more may appear if nuclear tests continue. And yet, nothing about the nuclear themes extends naturally from the crime drama, or vice versa - even despite the fact that the origin of the H-Men, a ship’s crew who were exposed to radiation, is even more obviously based on the Lucky Dragon incident that inspired Gojira than anything in Gojira itself. (Having discussed similar issues in the previous essay on The Mysterians, we’ll, uh, leave aside the optics of an irradiated ship’s crew turning into bloodthirsty monsters for now. At the very least, the ship’s crew here are far more abject and abstracted than the Mysterians were.) The crime and horror/monster genres don’t really mesh here beyond the feeling of “oh, that’s new, I guess,” and in providing multiple avenues for action beats toward the climax, as Masada risks his life to save Chikako (whom he has an obvious crush on) from Uchida during the civil authorities’ operation against the Liquid People. There’s a potential avenue here to examine how nuclear anxieties might underlie every genre of film made in Japan, not just the obvious ones, but Kimura and Honda do little to explore it.

And yet, The H-Man works just fine as a film. Even if the different genre elements don’t always mesh, the overall film flows well and benefits from the novel approach. Since Gojira, the challenge facing Toho’s monster movies has been the inevitable threat of diminishing returns. The H-Man goes further than any of the prior tokusatsu science fiction films in differentiating itself in terms of the human story being told, and demonstrates that the fantastical special effects elements can co-exist alongside other genres than the basic disaster film template. That there are imperfections with the result merely indicates that there were more refinements possible to the genre-crossing approach. Its monsters may not be giant, but quietly, The H-Man’s jazzy fusion of creepy radioactive horror and seedy crime film antics paved a new way forward for the kaiju genre, one that would exert a huge influence on the films to come.

As fun as films like The H-Man are on their own merits, we are ultimately covering them because of their connection to Godzilla, even though the Big G wouldn't appear in a new film until 1962. But here in 1958, a potential answer to the challenge of returning Godzilla to the screen without rehashing the original film presented itself, emerging from the dark corners of a haunted boat and shadowy sewers.

Return to the master We Call It Godzilla index here.