'THE H-MAN'.........HE'LL MELT YOUR HEART.......AND EVERYTHING ELSE.......

The H-Man (1958)   Forget defrosted dinosaurs.....forget giant ants.......forget invading aliens.........

           Nothing, but nothing could strike fear in our hearts like rampaging ooze.....once it slid under the doors or through the heating ducts, its one and only task was to glop 'n slop itself all over you, absorbing and dissolving you into nothingness........

            This kind of monster generated the most primal fear in audiences.......cause what were these things except metaphors for cancer........for some form of illness that could eat us alive while we helplessly watched......a much more likely fate than being stepped on by Godzilla.

             Filmmakers from various countries did their own variations on this ooey-gooey sort of creature.......in America, "The Blob" went oozing after rebels-without-a-cause teenagers led by Steve McQueen.......in Britain, the first two Quatermass films pitted alien slime against government and scientific bureaucracies....(followed up by "X The Unknown" a generous hunk 'o homegrown radioactive sludge from the Earth's core)......and Italy served up "Caltiki, the Immortal Monster", literally a huge pile of ambulatory, carnivorous tripe.......

             Japan, of course, had its own unique agenda.......still reeling from being the only country on earth that endured and survived nuclear warfare.....

              So it's no surprise that sci-fi/monster-meister Ishiro Honda took his inspiration for "The H-Man" from the unlucky fate of the 'Lucky Dragon', the infamous fishing boat that sailed into a cloud of radiation from an American H-bomb test......

            In Honda's film, the radiation melts six crew members of a "Lucky Dragon" type boat, turning them into liquid creatures who immediately melt and consume their fellow crew members......turning the whole boat into a sci-fi haunted house, since the things frequently re-form themselves into their once human shapes......

            The rest of movie never quite equals this eerie sequence, done as a flashback about halfway into the story.  Since the creepy, sentient, ever-hungry liquid still retains the intelligence of its absorbed victims.......it heads for familiar hangouts........like a cheesy cabaret nightclub frequented by loads of sleazy gangsters......whom you know are bound to end up as H-food........

             Silly?  Oh, you bet. Big time. But enormous fun to watch.

             Director Honda and his hard-working special effects crew go for a "whatever works" in their scenes of the H-Man attacking and melting humans.......everything from Looney Tunes cartooning to letting the air out of inflatable dummies........but their best (and most unnerving) effect by far shows the gelatinous creature sliding across walls, floors and over windowsills.

             You can't help falling in love with a Japanese movie that features a nightclub singer warbling insane, non-sequitur English lyrics obviously written by someone who was looking up each word individually in a dictionary.

            And for a movie with such a ghastly, horrific premise, it's scored with a wildly inappropriate main title theme......a rousing, blasting, blaring march.........(you could almost picture this being used for Donald Trump's upcoming military parade, the "salute to the Draft-Dodger-In-Chief")

           Fortunately for humanity, the cops and military set fire to every sewer and waterway in Tokyo to wipe out the H-Man........(since H-Guy is made of water, we wondered about that climax.......we always thought water trumped fire, but.....hey, what do we know?)

           A few lines of offscreen dialogue warn us that in the nuclear age, H-Man could make a comeback and inherit the earth......how true.....how true.

           For the BQ........H-Man, The Blob, X the Unknown and Caltiki will live forever in our hearts, minds and bad dreams.....oozing through our restless thoughts.....with  melting us, the only mission on their single-celled little brains......3 stars (***)......keep your eyes on that windowsill........