I'd like to officially go on record here as saying I freakin' love the Starman film series! They are not only action-packed, but quite stylish and occasionally creepy. They're also absurd as all get out, but that's part of their inherent charm. You're not really watching anything close to reality when you watch a Starman movie.
They're also a trifle incoherent, but this is not entirely the fault of the original material. The Japanese films were shorter featurettes edited together for American consumption. INVADERS FROM SPACE takes two separate but connected movies and joins them into a whole. It also loses a little subtext in converting Kappa Seijin into Salamander Men, and honestly, it sounds like the dubbing script was just made up on the fly without any thought to internal consistency.
No matter. INVADERS FROM SPACE is a rollicking good time. I enjoyed myself so much that I had to take a screenshot of this moment near the end of Starman about to kick some Salamander Man ass.
I don't know, Salamanders and Kappa are both water beings. they probably had no idea what kappa were at the time either, huh.
ReplyDeleteI only ever saw Atomic Rulers growing up, never knew there were more. and pictures in FM always credited Atomic Rulers with any Starman picture, including the mutants from Evil Brain from Outer Space. it was fun to find out there were more movies in the series.
dang it, Elam, now I have to watch these again.
I think it's a pretty good guess, but I just meant the folklore aspect of it falls by the wayside. This isn't really surprising, since I'm sure there weren't a lot of Westerners who even knew what a kappa was then!
ReplyDeleteI didn't get to see them until I was an adult (chronologically if not mentally), but descriptions of them tantalized me a lot in that old Fass magazine article.
You are welcome! :D