(aka Earth Defense Force)
A series of strange and seemingly unconnected events have occurred in a remote area. When the military gets called in to investigate the destruction of a small town, they find a monstrous burrowing robot. They destroy it after a heated battle, but then have a mysterious dome rise up out of the ground in front of them.
A group of peaceful aliens (or at least that’s what they say!) have come here from outer space and they only want a small piece of land to call their own.
Oh, and a few of our women.
The Mysterians represents several important firsts in the world of Japanese monster movies: the first color Kaiju Eiga film made by Toho; the first of their films to feature aliens trying to conquer the Earth; and the first appearance of the giant robot Moguera. It is quite an impressive creation, although we get to see far too little of it. It isn’t seen again after it is defeated some thirty minutes into the film until the very end when it burrows its way into in the final battle against the Mysterian base — but only if you are watching the Japanese version of the film.
But if you only know this one from the English language dub, don’t worry, as it is very obviously a rather small puppet in that sequence, and it gets destroyed again very quickly.
Heck, it never even makes it to the surface.
In a way, the opening reminds me of that of Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, which cuts from one event to another before the main narrative finally begins, without explaining how these events are related. In fact, it seems to make even less of an effort to connect them. This isn’t something we normally see in an American film. I wonder whether filmmakers in 1950s Japan thought that their audience was smarter than Hollywood thinks they are today.
But once it does get moving, we are thrust into one of the best sequences of the film and it never really slows down, even if it does take a while to get the main characters all involved in what’s going on. After all, we all know that monsters, flying saucers and the Japanese Self Defense Force are far more important than the human characters in these sorts of films.
You have to remember that in 1957, Godzilla had appeared in two films and wouldn’t be seen again for another six years. There were no plans to revive him again, although Toho had made Rodan earlier the same year and would follow it the next year with Varan the Unbelievable, and five years later, Mothra. I’m sure no one at Toho imagined that they’d be making monster movies for the next twenty years.
The Mysterians was made at the height of the Saucer craze of the Fifties, and one notes that, the year before, their competitor, Toei, made a somewhat similar aliens in flying saucers film, Warning from Space, as had Toho’s offshoot, Shintoho (the exceedingly rare and nearly lost Fearful Attack of the Flying Saucer). The result was successful enough that they then made a sequel (of sorts), Battle in Outer Space two years later, and then combined the alien invaders storyline with many of the late-Sixties and Seventies Godzilla films!
It was a good era for Toho’s Tokusatsu films, and this is one of the better examples. I have to admit one does wish that they’d given Moguera more screentime, but considering that he was a last minute addition because the producer, Tomoyuki Tanaka, felt the film needed a giant monster, we really can’t complain.
What really matters is that this is an enjoyable and entertaining film, even if it does embrace one of the oldest and most absurd SF cliches:
“Mars needs women!”
But, as they’ve got a giant robot, I’m more than willing to forgive The Mysterians even that.
rivets on the poster 
2 thoughts on “Chikyû Bôeigun [The Mysterians] (1957)”