The H-Man (1959)

The Worst Film Ever

Admirable film.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

H-Man, The (1958) ** (out of 4) Toho film has some excellent special effects but a story that made me want to punch the television. A man gets hit by a car but when the driver gets out to check on him he discovers that the man is gone and only his clothes remain. More and more stories of people being killed only to have their clothes remaining start piling up and soon it's learned that a blob-like substance is doing the killings. This Japanese film, from the team who brought us GODZILLA, is pretty much another version of THE BLOB and while there are some great moments we also get sucked into some pretty bad ones. I've often complained that the Godzilla films were weak because they didn't center their attention on the monsters and that holds true here as well because we get a subplot of gangsters, which ends up taking up nearly an hour of the 79-minute running time. The monster really doesn't take center stage till nearly the 50-minute mark, which is just crazy because of how good it is. There's an early sequence on a ship that is highly effective but moments like these are few and far between as we get too much dialogue with a boring subplot. The special effects for the blob creature are quite good and better than what we saw in the earlier American classic. I watched the P&S, American dubbed version, which was recently on Turner Classic Movies but will revisit the film when Columbia releases it later in the year. Rumored to include the Japanese version I will certainly give it a second take in its original language.

There were a few films from my childhood that really left an impression, and this was one - creepy! It IS out on VHS at least, maybe DVD, but Netflix doesn't have it. One of five or six such films that still hold up both as documents of their times and as scary as they were to a kid. I'd also recommend Quatermass 2, aka Enemy from Space, and for nonscary monsters, try 20 Million Miles to Earth. It's an interesting project to go back and see what of the stuff from childhood is still effective, and in what ways it is not. This Island Earth totally creeped me out, as did the 1953 War of the Worlds, and the original Invaders from Mars, but the remakes of these last two mostly failed. The H Man however is great. Enough lines yet?

I have searched several places to see if that movie was saved for the future generations to see. I was a kid when I saw it and it made a profound effect upon me. I would love to see it again! I seem to remember the part where a guy or a girl is in a telephone booth and is trying to make a call and all of a sudden "The H Man" attacks and you see the H Man melting the person in the booth. It crept up the person's leg and the person melted before your very eyes. It sort of reminds me of "The Blob" but more liquidy and chilling. I recommend it to everyone who wants to go back and see the superb work produced back then. It is a wonder to see the high standard of movie making that was happening back then.

As a first grader at age 6, I felt underpriveledged. All my class mates would come to school on Mondays bragging about whatever Saturday movie experience they had. Most of the time it was a Hercules, or Sinbad or other epic tale and their comments were vivid. But when the conversation revolved around a horror movie their version turned out to be a tease. I could tell that the real deal with horror pictures was to experience it personally. Here was the conumdrum, I wasn't allowed to go the the show without an adult and I didn't want to be seen by my friends with a parent. Well finally an aunt stepped up and volunteered to take me. In that darkened theater, finally seeing a horror movie for the first time, my anticipation was peaking: that is until the H Bomb went off and the tale of this insidious monster began. Needless to say my horror fascination came full circle by the end of the first reel, and the experience left me anxious for many, many, months! Thinking back to that screenining I feel that the H man was a landmark movie and probably generated the same type emotional response as the radio broadcast of War of the Worlds had a generation earlier. A remake would be awesome with todays technology, looking forward to it, and even a peak back to the past with the original version would be nice.