1958's "The H-Man" was not a kaiju eiga from Toho but a mixture of gangsters, science fiction and horror that shows how director Ishiro Honda could produce something unsettling and genuinely scary. An arresting rain drenched opening in which a thief is unable to escape an unseen menace that leaves only his empty clothes behind moves on to a police investigation into a narcotics ring using a popular nightclub as a front. The primary singer just happens to be the main squeeze of the missing thief, whose witness of a second gangster dissolving in the rain inspires a scientist (Kenji Sahara) to confirm a story about a ghost ship that passed through radioactive fallout from the H bomb, producing a liquid creature that devours human beings to survive (the original Japanese title translated as "Beauty and the Liquid People"). Whether aboard the ship's shadowy corridors or underneath the streets of Tokyo there's much to admire, as Eiji Tsuburaya delighted in the horrifying deaths, simply using human shaped balloons properly deflated to show the victim dissolving on screen, more effective than "The Blob," where we never actually saw anyone swallowed by the monster. A special compound was used for the liquid monster, tilted sets built so that technicians could just pour it down a wall for the desired effect. Another notable sequence shows how a frog can melt into a liquid creature, bubbling up in disquieting fashion, the stuff of childhood nightmares for those who saw it at the time. Toho would do more items of a similar nature, "Secret of the Telegian," "The Human Vapor," and "Dagora the Space Monster," all mixing gangsters and monsters, but Honda's horror masterpiece would be 1963's "Matango."
Review of The H-Man
