Attack from Space (RiffTrax)

Film Year:  1964 (edited from 1957 and 1958 short films)

Genre:  Science Fiction, Superhero

Director:  Teruo Ishii

Starring:  Ken Utsui

RiffTrax Year:  2016

Riffers:  Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy, Bill Corbett

The Movie

Just in case you thought Prince of Space and Invasion of the Neptune Men had too much artistic integrity, Starman is here to dumb it down for you!

An early Tokusatsu superhero from Japan is a character named Super Giant.  Super Giant was the heroic star of a series of serialized short films (these ranged from 39 minutes to under an hour, so they bounced back and forth between Academy standard of short to feature), where he was portrayed as a superpowered being created by universal peacekeepers who was tasked to keep the universe safe from evil.  Supposedly he was tasked to save entire galaxies, but most of his problems seem to reside in Japan.  In total, nine Super Giant films were made in between 1957 and 1959 and they were popular with children...so popular that one child seriously injured himself by jumping out of a window trying to fly like Super Giant, which of course caused an uproar against its fantasy violence.

Here in the US we received all the Super Giant films...more or less.  All nine were edited into a series of four television films each containing at least two of the Super Giant films (most were two-parters anyway, so the pairings came natural).  These films were Atomic Rulers of the World, Invaders from Space, Attack from Space, and Evil Brain from Outer Space.  In the US, Super Giant was also renamed to STARMAN!

Attack from Space is edited together from Super Giant 5 and 6, which sees a race of aliens kidnapping a professor and his family in hopes of using his experimental rocketships to destroy the Earth.  Starman discovers the evil scheme and seeks to find the family and crush his enemies with his choreography!

Like the other Super Giant/Starman films, Attack from Space is very much an "It is what it is" experience.  Its primary goal is to entertain children with its spandex clad hero prancing around and kicking people, and by all accounts that's exactly what it did.  Nuance?  Who needs it!  More static shots of Starman floating in space please!

I can approach Attack from Space from two directions.  One is as an adult, which the film is madcap stupidity that has no shame in its low aims.  The second is as a tokusatsu fan, of which the film is a very primitive form of the superhero subgenre that had yet been optimized by Ultraman, Kamen Rider, or Super Sentai, and is interesting even if it's recognizably shoddy.  It's through the latter that Attack from Space finds any form of watchability in today's climate of film enthusiasts, as it's just a stepping stone to a special interest audience of foreign entertainment.

Is there anything else?  Um...young kids might like it?  Though children tend to respond well to bright colors and Attack from Space's black and white cinematography makes it unlikely that modern child audiences will sit down and watch it.  Its has its place in toku history, but the world has gone on without Super Giant and unfortunately for him he doesn't seem to be missed.

The Trax

"Watching in a theater, Ed Wood cries out 'FAKE!'"

At long last, some Japanese cheese for RiffTrax to feast on!  Say what you will about literally any movie genre out there, but there is something about the disconnect between Japanese pop culture and western sensibilities that makes for some delightful humor.  It was true for all the Japanese films on Mystery Science Theater 3000, it was true for Cinematic Titanic when they did War of the Insects, and it's about time Mike, Kevin, and Bill took another crack at it (the previous Japanese film on RiffTrax was riffed by Matthew J. Elliott and Ian Potter).  This could be a warm-up round for their Live riff of Mothra in 2016, but for my money Attack from Space was much, much funnier.

The Starman movies are a fodder perfection, as they're seriously performed enough to play a straight man to the riffers while they're pretending to not look completely silly, like watching people perform dramatic recreations of Orson Wells monologues without pants.  Speaking of asses hanging out, there is a lot of emphasis on Starman's, as the actor's skintight costume leaves little to the imagination.  There is repeated horror at "Star-BULGE!" and lots of Starman thrusting his buttocks in the general direction of the audience.  "That's right folks, you could bounce a Yen on those butt cheeks!"  Starman by himself inspires a general goldmine of riffs by just existing, right down to a gauntlet of an ending where Starman just beats down an entire army by himself in one of those everyone-attacks-him-one-at-a-time fight scenes that just continues for about ten minutes.  The riffs at Starman and the fakey special effects are a complete knockout and this is the funniest section of the film.

Getting to that point does feel a little long in the tooth, but luckily this 70 minute ordeal doesn't take longer than necessary to make it there.  There are some solid quips at the befuddling plot, questioning element like the escaping civilians being found out by not having written orders ("Our heroes!  Nearly brought down by improper memo filing!") and being sentenced to death in a confusing way ("Death is too easy a penalty so you're executing them?").  Attack from Space is a delight at every corner, though its highest moments are mostly confined to a gutbusting climax.  That climax is enough for me to consider it a must-own, though not enough for me to fully put it on a pedestal of the best of its type.  It is an excellent argument that RiffTrax should probably riff the other Starman films, but alas that hasn't happened.

Good