is a 1967 Japanese science fiction ''

kaiju is a Japanese media genre that focuses on stories involving giant monsters. The word ''kaiju'' can also refer to the giant monsters themselves, which are usually depicted attacking major cities and battling either the military or other monster ...

'' film that was directed by Kazui Nihonmatsu and stars

Eiji Okada was a Japanese film actor from Chōshi, Chiba. Okada served in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II and was a miner and traveling salesman before becoming an actor. Internationally, his best-remembered roles include Lui ("him" in Fre ...

and Toshiya Wazaki. Guilala returned in a 2008 Shochiku sequel of sorts called '' Monster X Strikes Back: Attack the G8 Summit''.

Plot

The spaceship ''AAB Gamma'' is dispatched from

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

to the planet Mars to investigate reports of UFOs seen near the Red Planet. When the spaceship arrives, it encounters one of the UFOs, which suddenly sprays the ''AAB Gamma'' with spores. A sample of the spores is returned to Earth, where one of them begins to develop. The spore is accidentally exposed to acid, and grows grows into a giant, lizard-like creature that is named "Guilala". It continues to feed on any kind of energy source, and grows bigger and more powerful. The monster begins a reign of destruction through Tokyo. It spits fireballs, feeds on nuclear fuel, turns into a flaming orb to travel great distances by air in mere minutes, and destroys all aircraft and tanks in its path. Guilala is finally defeated by

fighter jets Fighter aircraft are fixed-wing military aircraft designed primarily for air-to-air combat. In military conflict, the role of fighter aircraft is to establish air superiority of the battlespace. Domination of the airspace above a battlefield ...

laden with bombs, which coat it in a substance called "Guilalalium", a substance that prevents it from absorbing energy. This causes Guilala to shrink down to its original spore form. Stored in a glass container filled with Guilalalium, it is rendered permanently harmless. The government promptly launches it back into space, where it will orbit the sun in a nigh-inescapable

heliocentric orbit A heliocentric orbit (also called circumsolar orbit) is an orbit around the barycenter of the Solar System, which is usually located within or very near the surface of the Sun. All planets, comets, and asteroids in the Solar System, and the Sun i ...

for the foreseeable future.

Cast

* Toshiya Wazaki as Captain K. Sano * Itoko Harada as Michiko Taki * Shinichi Yanagisawa as H. Miyamoto *

as Dr. Kato * Peggy Neal as Lisa Schneider (Japanese voice actor: Reiko Mutō) * Franz Gruber as Dr. Berman (Japanese voice actor: Tamio Ōki) * Mike Daneen as Dr. Stein (Japanese voice actor: Teiji Ōmiya) * Keisuke Sonoi as Dr. M. Shioda * Torahiko Hamada as Mr. Kimura * Hiroshi Fujioka as Moon base worker * Yuichi Okada as Guilala

Release

''The X From Outer Space'' was released in Japan on 25 March 1967. The film was never released theatrically in the United States, but instead was released directly to television in 1968 by

American International Television American International Pictures (AIP) is an American motion picture production label of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In its original operating period, AIP was an independent film production and distribution company known for producing and releasing fil ...

. The Criterion Collection released ''The X from Outer Space'' on DVD through their

Eclipse An eclipse is an astronomical event that occurs when an astronomical object or spacecraft is temporarily obscured, by passing into the shadow of another body or by having another body pass between it and the viewer. This alignment of three ce ...

label in a boxed set entitled ''When Horror Came to Shochiku'' (which also includes ''Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell'', ''The Living Skeleton'' and ''Genocide''). This DVD set offers both an English subtitled and a dubbed version of the film. This boxed set was released on November 20, 2012.

Reception

Film historian Chuck Stephens described the film as having "a well-deserved reputation as one of the silliest and, as a consequence, most beloved rubber-suit monster movies ever made". '' Sight & Sound'' described the film as a "harebrained kaiju epic" that was "Cheesy, rich in comic non sequiturs and scored with an unpredictable mishmash of 1960s pop and

bossa nova Bossa nova () is a style of samba developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It is mainly characterized by a "different beat" that altered the harmonies with the introduction of unconventional chords and an innovativ ...

. ''X'' fits comfortably into one's stoned best-bad-movie rental evening". Author and film critic Glenn Erickson characterized the film as "simply... terrible," describing the monster as "a preposterous concoction, einga 20-story chicken with a head shaped like a jet plane." Writing for Turner Classic Movies, critic Nathaniel Thompson wrote that the film "offers a substantial amount of entertainment value (and unintentional humor), thanks to its dual menaces of a gloppy space entity and a rampaging chicken monster," and included a "jaw-dropping and vaguely pornographic dispatching of the beast at the end."

References

Footnotes

Sources

* *

External links

* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:X From Outer Space, The Kaiju films 1967 films Shochiku films Films about astronauts Films set in Shizuoka Prefecture Films set in Tokyo 1960s science fiction films American International Pictures films 1960s Japanese films