Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell (Kyuketsuki Gokemidoro)

Hey, everybody! Sorry I haven't updated with any reviews in almost a week! But there's a reason for that. It's because this one is sort of special.
That's right, this is the 100th review that I've posted on I Probably Liked It since I began on January 1st. Up there is my deformed, lumpy, MS Paint counterpart. I call him Jalm. I don't have a mouse, so this was the best I could manage on one of those laptop touchpads. Believe it or not, the pictures actually do get a little better.

So, a couple weeks ago, I was following a thread on Twitter where director Edgar Wright was discussing important or awesome films he hasn't seen yet. In that discussion, he mentioned such classics as Gone with the Wind, which I also haven't seen yet. But another title grabbed my eye: Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell. Unlike "Gone with the Wind", that title just screams out "WATCH ME". I did a little research and found out that Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell is kind of hard to come by, but I eventually found an affordable copy on eBay, and here we are.

Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell, or Kyuketsuki Gokemidoro, is a Japanese horror film directed by Hajime Soto, and it is completely awesome. I can't believe this movie doesn't have a bigger cult. It is not only one of the craziest vampire movies I've ever seen, but also one of the best alien invasion movies I've ever seen. That's right, folks, alien vampires!

No, not like that! You'll see. It's also loaded with a strong anti-war message and social commentary. Yayy, substance!

Kyuketsuki Gokemidoro opens up on a plane in transit to Japan. We meet some of the passengers, the pilots and the stewardess (it's the 60's so she's not a flight attendant, duh!). Everyone is unsettled by a strange ominous phenomena: the sky has inexplicably turned blood red.

That sky might be familiar to you: Quentin Tarantino used it on The Bride's flight to Japan in Kill Bill Vol. 1. To add to the apocalyptic portent, birds keep splattering onto the windows of the plane, as though they've lost all sense of direction in their need to escape from something.
To add to this doom and gloom, the pilot gets word on his radio that there's a bomb on his plane. He must go down the aisle and search everyone's luggage to find it. Though a bomb doesn't turn up, the pilot does find a sniper rifle hidden in a secret compartment in one of the suitcases. Turns out that the owner of the luggage is a political assassin who just killed the Prime Minister of England or an Ambassador, someone important, I'm tired. He hijacks the plane, but before he can do anything about it, an object glowing with a blinding light shoots by overhead and malfunctions the plane, causing it to crash.

Now, stranded in the middle of nowhere, the survivors of this plane must deal with each other until they're rescued. The immediately clash. The survivors are as such: the level-headed copilot, the stewardess, an American woman whose husband just died in Vietnam, a corrupt senator, an arms dealer and his wife, who he treats like property, a detached psychiatrist, the suspected bomber, the assassin, and, incidentally, a space biologist (what luck!).

When the assassin, thought dead, comes to, he takes the stewardess hostage and leaves the plane. The copilot runs after them to save her. Little does he know what the assassin is going to find.
That's right, a spaceship. What you can't tell? Sorry, yeah, that's an orange, glowing spaceship. He falls into a trance and walks toward it like a moth to a flame, silhouetted and shimmering by the light. When he gets up to it he sees something approach. An oozing, pulsating blob. It's exerting its mind control on him.
The Space Turd throbs and then something crazy happens!
His forehead pops open! The Slime Monster disgustingly squiggles its way into the hole in his head. Then, as the assassin struggles to fight it, balls of light flash all over half of his face, and the Space Turd takes control, turning the assassin into a Space Vampire. YEAH!

The movie gets even cooler from there. The survivors argue and backstab each other and wish harm upon each other and just generally act like jerks, as the copilot and the stewardess try to keep them in line. And then we get to watch them get picked off one by one by this creepy monster with a hole in his head.

The filmmaking and effects are really cool. Hajime Soto uses all sorts of neat tricks with lighting and colors to draw us in. As you see above, he flashed a kaleidoscope of little circular lights on the assassin's face as he was being taken over by the alien. Another really cool little lighting trick happens when the Space Vampires drink people's blood.

He changes the lighting in the shot to a blue light, making it look like all life and color has been drained from the passengers' skin.

The monster, specifically the Assassin as possessed by the Alien, is truly iconic and badass. As if that gross, bright red hole in his forehead wasn't enough, he is clad all in white; turtleneck, jacket, pants, shoes, even white gloves. And not a speck of dirt of blood gets on him. This guy is good.
I'm not going to tell you who lives or who dies, and I'm not going to tell you the awesome, awesome ending, but I will leave you off with one more tantalizing glimpse into Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell.
So, this is a pretty amazing movie. I recommend you hunt down a copy and check it out. I can't believe it doesn't have a bigger cult following in America. Let's do something about that, shall we?

So, that's all, folks! Thanks to everyone who has been reading my dumb little reviews for the last 10 months. Thanks to everyone who just read it once, too. I hope you liked my drawings, it was super fun to do. I definitely want to do more in the future, but this was insanely time consuming for such crude pictures. No, I'm not much better with pen and paper. And hey, I'd love to hear what you think, so feel free to leave comments on this or any of my other entries.

Bye!