By any sane standard, this is a terrible film, though some of the rottenness of the film is due to a horrid dub into English (renamed "Invasion of the Neptune Men"). But bad dubbing aside, the viewer can tell that even in its original Japanese form the movie was a total turkey. So bad, in fact, that it's a great film to watch with friends so you can take pleasure laughing at its ineptness.
The closest thing you can find to a star in this film is the famous Sonny Chiba, who made some incredibly good martial arts films in the 1970s and was also in the recent KILL BILL films. However, here in one of his earliest roles, the guy is given the impossible task of playing "Space Chief"--a silly super-hero in tights and a helmet who takes on the dreaded Neptunians! Although the film seems to be set in the early 1960s, Space Chief fires a nifty ray gun and drives what looks like a drunk hover-car. With just his ray gun and crappy car that wobbles incessantly, Space Chief is able to get the upper hand because the invaders are so gosh-darn lame--complete with uniforms with pointy metal helmets. When they take off the helmets, it gets even worse, as the Neptune invaders appear to be guys wearing lipstick and makeup. It can't be all that hard to beat up an army of cross-dressers!
While the cheesy toy cities (like those seen in Godzilla films) are pretty bad and the hero is pretty silly, the worst part about this film is that it is permeated with the most nauseating 1960s Japanese film cliché--the "clever kids" who are much smarter than everyone else and who the adults won't believe. These kids are smarter than Einstein, Steven Hawking and Edison put together and they quickly figure out the problem. I'm sure this was plot device was used because the film was marketed to kids, but frankly if you've seen this schtick before in such insipid films as GODZILLA VS. THE SMOG MONSTER, JOHNNY SOKKO AND HIS FLYING ROBOT and GAMERA, then there is no logical reason you'd want to see it again. Watching this supposedly cute tykes (that were instead annoying little know-it-alls) was more than bad--it was downright awful and made me grind my teeth!
While some of the special effects weren't THAT bad and were a few steps above PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, at other times they were dreadful. Oddly, however, there is one scene that briefly appears in the film that I am at a total loss to understand. You see a building with Japanese writing on it explode towards the end. However, and here's the inexplicable part, there's a giant cutout of Adolph Hitler on the building that, in scale, would be at least 9 stories high. What???!!! If anyone DOES know why this was inserted, let me know--it really was tacky and confused the life out of me! Couldn't they have found some other stock footage to use? Did they think people would see Hitler and NOT recognize him!??!?! This might just be the worst and most offensive use of stock footage in film history! Could it have been used because, to many Japanese, all Westerners look alike?!
The closest thing you can find to a star in this film is the famous Sonny Chiba, who made some incredibly good martial arts films in the 1970s and was also in the recent KILL BILL films. However, here in one of his earliest roles, the guy is given the impossible task of playing "Space Chief"--a silly super-hero in tights and a helmet who takes on the dreaded Neptunians! Although the film seems to be set in the early 1960s, Space Chief fires a nifty ray gun and drives what looks like a drunk hover-car. With just his ray gun and crappy car that wobbles incessantly, Space Chief is able to get the upper hand because the invaders are so gosh-darn lame--complete with uniforms with pointy metal helmets. When they take off the helmets, it gets even worse, as the Neptune invaders appear to be guys wearing lipstick and makeup. It can't be all that hard to beat up an army of cross-dressers!
While the cheesy toy cities (like those seen in Godzilla films) are pretty bad and the hero is pretty silly, the worst part about this film is that it is permeated with the most nauseating 1960s Japanese film cliché--the "clever kids" who are much smarter than everyone else and who the adults won't believe. These kids are smarter than Einstein, Steven Hawking and Edison put together and they quickly figure out the problem. I'm sure this was plot device was used because the film was marketed to kids, but frankly if you've seen this schtick before in such insipid films as GODZILLA VS. THE SMOG MONSTER, JOHNNY SOKKO AND HIS FLYING ROBOT and GAMERA, then there is no logical reason you'd want to see it again. Watching this supposedly cute tykes (that were instead annoying little know-it-alls) was more than bad--it was downright awful and made me grind my teeth!
While some of the special effects weren't THAT bad and were a few steps above PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, at other times they were dreadful. Oddly, however, there is one scene that briefly appears in the film that I am at a total loss to understand. You see a building with Japanese writing on it explode towards the end. However, and here's the inexplicable part, there's a giant cutout of Adolph Hitler on the building that, in scale, would be at least 9 stories high. What???!!! If anyone DOES know why this was inserted, let me know--it really was tacky and confused the life out of me! Couldn't they have found some other stock footage to use? Did they think people would see Hitler and NOT recognize him!??!?! This might just be the worst and most offensive use of stock footage in film history! Could it have been used because, to many Japanese, all Westerners look alike?!