The H-Man (1958) – Review

While Ishiro Honda will always be most famous for unleashing a 165 foot tall irradiated lizard onto the world as it masqueraded as the social anxieties for post-war Japan, his non-Godzilla output was equally eccentric. While still tapping into that vein of socially conscious sci-fi that served to voice the uncertainties of the identity crisis his country was facing, Honda still delivered a steady stream of genre fare when he wasn’t siccing Godzilla on the general public at large. However, while his filmography not only contained rival Kaiju (Mothra, Rodan, War Of The Gargantua), he also deployed a bunch of sci-fi potboilers that offered up flying super-submarines, killer mutant mushroom people and – in the case of the film we’re currently examining – vicious blob beings that dissolve their victims with a touch.
Thus we come to The H-Man, Honda’s 1958 movie that still tried to deliver warnings about the use of the hydrogen bomb in a way that inly 50s sci-fi can – with goo!

On the crime plagued streets of Tokyo, we witness a drug smuggler named Misaki try to ply his trade as he makes a switch with his contact, but during this highly illegal deal something goes horribly wrong and he seems to all but disappear leaving only his clothes behind. In the absence of anyone witnessing a naked criminal tip-toeing away from the scene, the police descend upon the “crime”, hoping to figure out what the Hell happened and question his club singer girlfriend, Arai Chikako.
While Arai hasn’t seen her missing beau in days, this sets off a string of occurrences that seem to surround the hapless singer in a maelstrom of questions that don’t seem to have any answers. Next she’s approached by Masada, a young university professor who has a theory that Misaki was dissolved by radioactive rain; but soon after that she’s also confronted and threatened by one of the men her boyfriend worked for; but he too vanishes under mysterious circumstances that only leaves an empty pile of clothes in its wake.
After trying to convince the police of his wild theory, Masada soon realises that his claims of people melting rain are wildly off the mark when it’s revealed that the culprit is a creature comprised of pure liquid that’s been created by H-Bomb tests and has been living in the Tokyo sewer system when it hasn’t been oozing its way up to the surface to dissolve its victims with the merest touch.
However, while he finally gets the police on his side, Masada is too late to stop the “H-Man” attacking Arai’s club (she really has the worst luck with amorphous blob people) and in the aftermath, plans are put in places to stop the creature once and for all. However, there’s still the little matter of the criminal gang wanting to get back their hidden stash of drugs that Misaki squirreled away before his literal meltdown. Can Masada save Arai and the city from the devastating effects of the H-Man?

I think it’s fair to say that Honda’s best work lay in the Kaiju genre which continues to thrive to this very day, however while his familiar themes don’t quite work as well here as they did in Godzilla, The H-Man still stands as an above-average offering of his that doesn’t offer up any rubber-suited giant monsters. However, what’s fascinating about the movie – other than if The Blob was remade as a film noir mystery – is how much Honda prioritises the cops and robbers element over the fact that there’s a marauding goo monster turning mobsters and police into bubbling puddles.
Anyone expecting the usual brand of 50s monster movie hysteria we were getting from America at the time may well be perplexed at Honda’s decision to bury his monstrous lead in favour of street crime, but anyone familiar with his work knows that he often strived to put his outlandish radiation metaphors into the realest world he possibly could in order to make his points as quickly and decisive as he could. Still, there’s a lot of cops and robbers stuff – in fact, there’s so much that the dubbed American version cut out a whopping ten minutes of side plots in order to try and prioritise the fact that The H-Man is supposed to be a monster movie. In the American’s defense, the movie does tend to move at a crawl that matches the slow, creeping drip of the titular creature and the numerous plot threads do tend to be quite distracting – a whole section is given over to a long flashback involving a bunch of fishermen discovering the creature arriving in Tokyo by boat – but when Honda finally gets down and dirty with the monster stuff, it tends to be genuinely quite creepy.

Whether it takes its form as a thick liquid, sentient that can run up walls and envelop it’s screaming victims, or it takes a moment to gather itself up into green, glowing, humanoid mass, it’s worth remembering that Honda’s opus was released in Japan a good three months before The Blob came out in America which suggests that the 70s sequel, Son Of Blob, could well technically actually been the Grandson Of Blob. But while The Blob tried to gorge itself on a picturesque American town, Honda’s version only seems to stick to people (figuratively speaking) that play on the wrong side of the tracks, seeming to primarily absorb wrongdoers like a slimy vigilante while only occasionally taking out innocent waiters, dancers and the odd cop. Yes the effects are fairly archaic, but the fact that Honda seems so eager to show people melting before you right on camera shows that he’s going for full horror and it’s here that you realise what he’s trying to accomplish.
By placing all the more noir aspects at the forefront, the director is hoping to make the H-Man attacks more random and therefore more scary and that flashback I mentioned before that’s plonked right in the middle of the film isn’t just a creepy little set piece in its own right, but it’s odd placement almost harkens to the random scene switching of modern horror flicks like Barbarian. Of course, once the hydrogen cat is out of the bag, The H-Man is free to take a more familiar sci-fi route of scientists discussing science-y things and mounting a last minute, last ditch attempt to eradicate the problem that ultimately comes off without a hitch presumably because there’s only ten minutes left of the film to go. Actually, I have to say, while the fact that there’s multiple H-Men lurking in the sewers is obviously a major cause for concern, the steps the good guys take to defeat them seem a little short sighted as the boffins elect to light Tokyo’s entire sewer system on fire which causes a massive – but impressive – conflagration.

Why your mileage may vary when it comes to Honda’s choice to focus so much on the human subplots, it is a noticeable example of how much importance the director puts on putting his outlandish creature into surroundings that feel real and original. I have to say, while I do prefer Honda’s Kaiju movies over his more normal-sized bouts of science fiction, The H-Man deftly proves that the Americans didn’t have the monopoly on 50s, atomic panic.
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