As our movie begins (following a pre-title mushroom cloud greeting), something that sounds like a distorted sound effect from Pong *BOOOIIIOOOOIIIOOOOIIING*s needlessly in the background while a hoodlum named Misaki steals a bag of sweet sweet heroin from another man’s bus station locker amidst a raging downpour… damn kids and their drugs and their bell-bottom pants and their 8-track cassette tapes... Before he can escape with his partners in crime, ‘Saki is struck with a bout of searing gas pain or a Charlie Horse or something, writhing in sudden stabbing agony as his partners drive off and he’s left to be struck down by a cab driver. But, when the cabbie gets out to see just how much time he’ll be spending in prison for this little accident Saki is gone, leaving behind only his clothing as we pan to a shot of an ominous looking storm drain… you laugh now, but when the storm drains of the world go on strike and flood the planet, washing humanity into the oceans so they can have the Earth all to themselves, we’ll see how funny you think it is when I’m sitting right there with them, laughing at all of you from the goodness of the shoreline, my dick in the sweetest, softest coconut you’ll ever see while two hot female storm drains paw at my awesomeness...

When the fuzz probes deeper into the incident, they turn up ‘Saki’s girlfriend Chikako… who, despite being the moll for a drug dealing hoodlum, doesn’t know well enough to lock her damn door or demand a search warrant from the cops. Tailing Chikako to see if they can turn up her missing beau, the 5-0 instead find a guy named Dr. Masada who has been in touch with Chik to investigate his theory that ‘Saki was actually dissolved into nothingness by rain that was seeded with ash from the atomic bombs that we American pig-dogs dropped on their heads back in the ‘40s. But, if it were something as simple as nuclear waste precipitation from the incidents that turned the Land of the Rising Sun into the Land of the Glowing Civilians, then why was ‘Saki the only one affected and not the thousands of other pedestrians caught singing in the rain?

Back to Chik, she gets an unwanted visit from one of her man’s old “business associates” (whose dubbed voice sounds like a clusterfuck of Edward G. Robinson, Fu Manchu and a duck), but when the goon escapes back into the night we hear him fire several shots into the darkness (at what Chik would later describe as “a green shadow”) before screaming and leaving behind his own dapper duds for the police to discover later. Soon after this scene, the always reliable Toho plot device of delirious, injured fisherman comes up as two such gentlemen wash up in the local hospital blabbering about an abandoned cargo ship they found and *dramatic pause* PILES OF UNMANNED CLOTHING! Yeah, you could see that coming, right? Given the all caps way in which it was presented, I’m not surprised. Anyway, in addition to the captain’s log book (I’m sorry, “rog” book), the unfortunate fishermen damn their curiosity when humanoid snot monsters materialize from nowhere and start dissolving their flesh! Naturally two of the men escaped so we could get that aforementioned classic Toho plot device, followed up by the discovery that a life-saver from that self-same abandoned booger cruiser has washed ashore… no doubt along with some of that sentient sinus slime in tow…

According to Doc Masada, his new theory (given that the nuclear rain things wasn’t so much a theory as a wild assumption) is that H-Bomb tests done in the Pacific waters off-shore created contaminated water and when the freighter ship passed into those waters, it was boarded by what is quickly named “the H-Man”. Back to the less interesting part of our movie, the black & whites use Chik as bait to take down the night clubbing Yakuza dicks that have been hassling her, with the exception of the head thug Uchida who decoys the cops by disrobing and leaving his suit behind while he hides amidst the chaos of an all out phlegm storm when the slime, sure enough, attacks that very nightclub on tonight of all nights, turning more of it’s victims into piles of Mr. Sparkle cleaning detergent. If nothing else, at least the pants and shirts left behind will be clean and fresh smelling, as Mr. Sparkle banishes all dirt to the land of wind and ghosts…

After fooling the fuzz into thinking himself dissolved, Uchida pops up to kidnap Chik and force her to take him to ‘Saki’s drug stashin’ spot in the sewers to recover a 500,000,000 yen (roughly $26…) brick of heroin. Masada tries to pursue, which leads to one of the worst car chases ever committed to celluloid as the entire events consists of 90% interior shots from the cars (as shot in front of blue screens) and 10% slightly sped up footage of the two cars casually following each other down a street as the all important squealing tire sounds are supplanted over the audio track at moments when the cars are simply driving straight… Man, the film used to shoot this ball-achingly bad scene could’ve been used for something more important, like a shampoo commercial or a public service announcement about pubic lice. Either way, Uchi (pronounced “yucky”) escapes into the sewers with Chik, he recovers the drugs, then strips her down (don’t get excited, I think the slip she’s wearing under her clothes somehow covers more of her skin than the clothes she lost) and tosses her clothes into sewer so everyone will think that the nostril homunculus ingested her. Masada’s not one to give up on his one chance at a science nerd getting major babe-age on his Bunsen Burner outside of a Revenge of the Nerds sequel, and his search proves fruitful when Uchi becomes part of the gooey collective and he and Chik are able to escape to the street… before the military (dressed in their lovely powder blue, anti-slime body condoms) flood the sewer system with gasoline (because obviously shooting the blob with a few hundreds rounds of gunfire didn’t help any of it’s previous victims) and burn down the entire city in an overzealous effort to put an end to the H-Man… There’s that “military intelligence” for ya.

And it’s all wrapped up with Dr. Maki (the story’s resident “case of a scientist declaring martial law”) addressing the public that the H-Man has, without a doubt, been destroyed by the raging inferno (as has 70% of the city…). But, Maki also gets uber hippie on us, threatening mankind that unless we give up our tamperings in the realm of nuclear weapons we will one day be replaced as the top of Mother Nature’s food chain by future H-Men… then again, given that we never found out what happened with the ship that H-Man came in on, nor is there any proof there aren’t already more H-Men hiding just off-shore waiting for the city to stop burning to the ground so they can take over the rubble… then again again, it’s been 50 years, so I think any possibilities for more H-Men (or a sequel in which they would star) are buried under a firm 6ft of concrete. And you won’t see me shedding any tears over this fact as it tucks me in and kisses me goodnight.

While looking up info on this flick I noticed a number of mentions by people who had nightmares about the H-Man upon seeing it. Given that a movie hasn’t given me nightmares since the second Puppet Master flick came out (though each of the sequels after Puppet Master III have been a constant source of waking nightmares for me these last 10 or so years), I guess I missed out on such inspiring childhood terrors as not picking my nose out of fear that they would leap off of my finger and turn me into Mr. Bubbles. Sure, I’ll probably torment my future brood with this flick at an early age just to mess with them, but as it stands right here and now with me, the movie was only scaring me with all the time I’ve wasted reviewing it. And I’ll tell you why:

First, the car chase scene. I’ve explained that little suppository to you already, so the less time I burn up bitching about it here the better off we’ll all be. Beyond that, I always have a hard time sitting through a movie that really has little or no business with the title threat. I don’t like it when it feels like you’re watching one movie, only to have another show up shooting on the same lot, so the two wind up integrated. If you took out the H-Man elements of this flick, you’d have a full-fledged hoodlum movie on your hands. Granted, it would be a generic, nigh-unwatchable hoodlum movie, but it’d still be there. On the other hand, if you tried to take Godzilla out his Toho premiere, well, there’d be no movie. I guess you could replace Big G and make it about war and atomic bombs and stuff, but it still wouldn’t be a complete movie. It’s never a good thing when it feels like your title monster is taking a backseat to all the human crap. I know, Godzilla’s absent from ¾ of the running time for all of his movies, but he at least makes himself the star when he is around, while the H-Man just kinda slimes around and gets torched in the end. Meh.

I might actually enjoy the movie more once I get my hands on an original Japanese language copy though, as the biggest offender for the movie was the horrendous English dub audio track that assailed my ear drums like Freddy Krueger with the unholy Q-Tip in Freddy’s Dead. I don’t know if white people were hired to record the dialog and told to read everything in a disgusting Asian caricature by replacing all their ‘L’s with ‘R’s, or if the people reading the lines are genuinely Japanese and were just living up to the stereotype. Either way, I’ve learned that the two (that’s right, TWO) scenes of Chik singing for her nightclub gig are still dubbed over by the same deep white woman voice in either version, so not even an original language version can fix that monstrosity. Bah, a pox on thee! On the plus side, being a Toho movie you know there are bound to be a number of times when you’ll say to yourself, “Hey, he/she looks familiar!” and it won’t just be because you’re still a firm believer in the “they all look alike” cultural misnomer. This includes getting to see Akihiko Hirata in action once again, only sans his trademark eye-patch, as seen in his best Toho roles as Dr. Serizawa in the very first Godzilla/Gojira and as the diabolic Captain Yamoto in Godzilla Vs. the Sea Monster. The man was always great to watch and it sucks that I had to take him out with lung cancer back in ’84… sometimes I hate my job.

What it all comes down to is whether H-Man is worth tracking down, as it’s currently out of print and has yet to be released on DVD in the US. If you’re looking for a party flick with laughable action sequences and the funniest case of Godzilla Lip you’re likely to see anywhere, go for it. If you’re looking for a good Japanese anti-nuclear sci-fi scare flick, Honda has done so much better, best illustrated by his original environmentalist film, Godzilla/Gojira… or even Godzilla Vs. the Smog Monster, which is much wackier and better suited for a party that The H-Man anyway… so to Hell with it, there’s really no need for the movie after all! With that I’ve gotta go pick up some tissues as my own H-Men are starting to make a strategic military push into my sinuses and it’s really getting irritating. Always wipe and stay off the pipe, kids! Later!