Before the giant monsters of Toho stomped their way through every major city, director Ishirō Honda was creating terrors of a different kind. He was the genius behind Godzilla. In 1958, he brought audiences a much sloppier kind of terror with The H-Man (Bijo to Ekitai-ningen). This film blends a gritty post-war crime thriller with chilling atomic-age horror. It proves that sometimes, the scariest thing isn’t a giant lizard. Instead, it’s an invisible puddle of sentient, radioactive slime that literally melts people right out of their clothes!
The Plot: Noir Meets Nuclear Fallout
The movie starts with a mystery inspired by a hard-boiled detective novel. On a dark and stormy Tokyo night, a gangster named Misaki vanishes during a drug deal. He leaves behind only his empty suit and a pile of illegal narcotics near a storm drain.
- The Police Procedural: Determined Inspector Tominaga (Akihiko Hirata, often seen as Dr. Serizawa in Godzilla) suspects a gangland hit and focuses his investigation on Misaki’s beautiful girlfriend, Chikako Arai (Yumi Shirakawa), a singer at a seedy-glamorous cabaret. The police and rival gangsters hound Chikako, all convinced she knows where Misaki—or the drugs—are hiding.
- The Scientific Side: Enter Dr. Masada (Kenji Sahara), a young scientist. He is one of the few to connect the bizarre disappearances to something far more sinister. He believes that creatures born from hydrogen bomb test fallout in the South Pacific liquefied Misaki and others. The source? The crew of a contaminated fishing vessel, the Ryūjin Maru No. 2, who mutated into amorphous, acidic entities dubbed the H-Men (for “Hydrogen” bomb).
- The Unbelievable Truth: The police initially laugh off Masada’s “radioactive ooze” theory. However, as more victims—including club patrons and cops—dissolve into wet piles of empty clothes, the terrifying truth sinks in. The H-Men have infiltrated Tokyo’s vast, shadowy network of sewers!
Special Effects: Gooey, Green, and Ghoulish
This film is a prime example of the incredible practical effects wizardry of Eiji Tsuburaya. Since the monster wasn’t a man in a rubber suit, Tsuburaya and his team had to get creative to bring the terrifying liquid to life:
- The Dissolve Effect: To show victims dissolving, the crew used life-sized, wax or latex dummies dressed in the actors’ clothes. Filming them deflating or being melted by heat (with optical effects added later) resulted in the chilling visual of a person instantly reducing to a wet stain and a heap of fabric. It’s an eerie, effective, and deeply unsettling effect that holds up surprisingly well.
- The Liquid Itself: The H-Men appear as sentient, glowing, green-blue liquid blobs. They often rise up from drains and drip from ceilings. The effects team used animation, water tanks, and clever lighting to make the viscous terror look mobile and predatory.
Themes: Anti-Nuclear Horror
Like the original Godzilla four years earlier, The H-Man carries a potent anti-nuclear message. The creature is not a prehistoric beast. This is a grim consequence of unchecked atomic testing. This issue resonated deeply in Japan following the real-life Lucky Dragon No. 5 incident.
The horror is intimate and modern. It’s not just a city being stomped. The human body is being erased by a chemical process. This originates from the very fallout people feared.
The Fiery Climax
The film shifts from a police procedural to a desperate, fiery rescue mission. Dr. Masada and the police realize the H-Men have a key vulnerability: fire and dehydration.
The final act is a spectacular descent into the dark, claustrophobic sewers beneath Tokyo, where the authorities try to flush out the blobs by pouring gasoline into the drains and setting the underworld ablaze! It’s a gripping, neon-drenched, and utterly unique climax that pits human ingenuity against an existential puddle of atomic revenge.
The H-Man is a cult classic that truly stands apart from its kaiju brethren. It’s a masterful blend of crime fiction and sci-fi horror, proving that sometimes, the smallest monster can leave the biggest, most chilling mark.
If you would like to read more entries in my Basement Retrospective series, please click HERE! If you’d like to add this movie to your film collection, please click on the DVD cover below.
