MESSAGE FROM SPACE [1978]

The planet Jilucia has been nearly decimated by the forces of the Gavanas under the evil ruler Rocksaia XII, who now basically ruke the planet. In desperation, Kudo, the Jilucian leader, sends out eight mystical Liabe seeds which, according to legend, will each summon a powerful warrior to help. They travel through space, followed by Princess Emeralida and loyal Jillucian soldier Urocco. They soon encounter disgruntled ex-military commander General Garuda and his robot companion Beba-2, thrill-seekers Shiro and Aaron, gambler Jack, aristocrat Meia and swordsman Hans, who has a deeply personal score to settle with the Gavanas Empire….

In 1980, Roger Corman and his New World Pictures came out with Battle Beyond The Stars, with special effects and production design from a certain James Cameron. It was one the best of the many movies that attempted to cash in on the success of Star Wars, though in terms of plot it was one of a fair few films which used the basic premise of Seven Samurai, where seven disparate fighters are hired by poor villagers to defend them against a warlord and his many soldiers, though of course that itself was inspired by the novel The Eight Dog Warriors aka Satomi Hakkenden. In fact by the time Battle Beyond The Stars had come out, it had already been relocated to a space opera world by Japan’s Toei Studios and Kinju Fukasaku, famed for his Yakuza pictures but a diverse filmmaker who dabbled in a lot of genres. And neither Battle Beyond The Stars nor Rebel Moon which very recently utilised the premise are much like Message From Space which, while unashamedly cribbing so much from Star Wars that George Lucas may not have been too happy. Rushed through production to come out five months before it, is actually a lot closer to the feel of the ’30s and ’40s serials which Lucas cited as being a major inspiration, and perhaps even more notably is far stranger, crammed with weirdness and eccentric touches, so much so that watching it with its English dub might actually be a more appropriate thing to do then doing so in its Japanese soundtrack; the lousy voicing and dialogue might help the experience. Unfortunately screenwriters Fukusaku and Hiro Matsuda aren’t always too sure with their plotting despite the wacky and even quite lovely touches they frequently provide, but the special effects by Nobuo Yajima, while lacking the technological advances such as motion capture which Lucas’s film was able to incorporate, are generally very impressive indeed. Tbis is not War In Space, Toho’s lame cash-in attempt from 1977 which aped its 1959 and 1964 glories Battle In Outer Space and Atragon but was weaker technically – well, except for all the stock footage used.

The titles play over a journey through space before alighting on a planet. This all looks very good; unfortunately the very obvious model work of the planet’s surface pales by comparison, though of course one can still admire the construction. A narrator, who rather unfortunately returns a few times later, most damagingly when the stakes are raised immensely but we don’t feel the tension that should result from this, tells us of the situation. Kido, the leader of Jullucia, apparently only had 60 soldiers with which to defend his planet against the Gavanas Empire, and all that appears to be left are some primitive folk wearing wreaths around their heads and in some cases on their clothes. Kida lets loose the seeds and orders his daughter Emeralida to follow; the warrior Urocco insists on protecting her. Emperor Rockseia’s headquarters sees the ship fly by – and by the way it really is a ship, with sails – and doesn’t think anything of it, but his wiser mother knows how dangerous it could be if the seeds find some defenders and therefore some hope, so the ship is shot at and pursued. However, we’re in an unsoecified future yea where “Earthlings” are exploring other planets, so a spoilt rfich kid named Meia is nearing the world of Milazeria when she spots hotrodders Shiro and Aaron, as they race each other through an asteroid belt. Notified by Meia’s chauffeurs, Patrolman Fox pursues the duo to Milazeria and the three ships all crash after stunt-flying through rocky canyons and tunnels. This is all quite exciting and impressive, a fine opening action sequence to start things off. Examining their spacecraft, the hotrodders find Liabe seeds, and wonder what they are and how they got there.

At the Milazeria military base, General Garuda mourns the mandatory deactivation of Beba-1, his faithful robot. He orders a rocket to launch its remains into deep space, but his commanding officer condemns this as a waste of a valuable rocket; the General, disillusioned, decides to retire and leaves the base with his new robot servant Beba-2. Later, while drinking heavily inside a busy tavern to Beba-2’s disapproval, Garuda finds a Liabe seed in his drink. In the same place, Shiro and Aaron are pressured by Jack to repay the money they borrowed to fix their ships, which he’d in turn borrowed from gangster Big Sam. Meia agrees to help Shiro and Aaron with their financial problems if they take her to a quarantined section of the asteroid belt where she can view ‘fireflies’, a strange radioactive phenomenon. Shiro and Aaron are willing, but Jack warns that Meia is going to get them into trouble. And now we get one of the film’s strangest scenes, where the group float about in space, without their helmets or oxygen tanks and talking while trying to catch these so-called fireflies for ages. It’s very obvious that there’s glass between the actor and the fireflies, though in a way it makes things even odder. They also encounter the wreckage of the Jillucian space galleon with Emeralida and Urocco inside. The Gavanas’ spacecraft-carrier arrives, forcing the others to flee, before destroying both the Jillucian galleon and Patrolman Fox’s ship. The survivors return to Shiro and Aaron’s home on Milazeria, where police spacecraft fill the sky. Garuda, sleeping nearby, is awakened by all this though isn’t the type to join in now, is he? Emeralida explains that the Liabe have divinely selected eight to liberate their planet. The others are sympathetic but unwilling to get involved in a war. Garuda hands his Liabe seed to Emeralida and leaves. Beba-2 follows Garuda, trying to change his mind. With lots going on – drugging, kidnapping, squabbling and a lot of questions involving loyalty but not much sense of a story progressing until a prince character shows up to speed things up again, the few Jillucians still alive are in danger, but so is the Earth. Can our group form a proper team and rid the galaxy of these fiends?

The seeds that look for and find people is a lovely concept, even though they feature in the film’s cheapest way to move the plot forward when, in a circle with additional seeds, they reveal something very important which helps the good guys no end, while the revelations of the last three defenders are absolutely no surprise at all, though it’s possible that they weren’t actually intended to be. Even in the Japanese version, lines like “I will never forget your incredible kindness to robots” and “this is my son, I gave birth to him on Pluto” might still cause some chuckling while bits of intentional humour don’t really come off, such as some slightly slapsticky fighting. but we can all be amused by things like the disco spacesuits and indeed the disco, which is so very 70s; this might be a space opera set quite a way into the future, but the decision was made to make sure it extremely of its time in places. A romantic element is so muted you wonder why it was put in there in the first place – oh silly me, it’s because another film had it that way. However, a revelation of childhood memories of countryside and animals is a touching little moment that could have done with being longer, but then you could say that about quite a few bits, including the climax which partly mimics a climax from that certain other film yet also looks forward to a variation on said climax in its second sequel, but the frequent spaceship journeyjng, fighting and chasing looks great, and with some cracking real explosions too, which makes it a shame when we get jarring cost cutting measures like we’re about to get a crash but all we do is cut from a POV of a planet getting bigger to the crash having happened and people walking away from it. And, sadly, hardly anything is done with the idea of one planet being propelled in the direction of another, which brings back memories of Gorath for Japanese sci-fi fans.

The costumes wildly vary, which is something you often got in the old serials where the makers just raided the studio costume rooms and used whatever they could find, but that’s taken to diverse and eye popping extreme here. The Gavanas baddies, outfitted with Samurai armour and red capes with their faces in white greasepaint, are especially memorable. The film is just terrific to look at continuously. Chiba fans may be initially disappointed. His character has a sword, but gets tasered in one scene just after he draws it, and runs several times towards a guy on horseback and gets repeatedly knocked down, before finally getting to slash and stab his way through lots of bad guys near the end and duel with Mikio Narita as the Emperor. The international cast generally works well with each other, though not everyone will count the bits where the Japanese cast members just yell at each other, which make Chiba come across as really restrained. Vic Morrow, sometimes rather wooden in such films, really seems to feel his sad, lonely character, though Peggy Lee Moran’s wide-eyed, grinning goofiness as Meia can get annoying very quickly. Etsuko Shihomi aka Sister Streetfighter doesn’t get to do enough as Emeralida, and a very young Hiroyuki Sanada makes an impression sometimes. Viewer will probably be divided on Beta-1. Essentially a combination of R2D2 and C-3PO, a bit human-like in appearance but bleeping away far more than talking I found hin quite cute, and kids probably will too. Fukasaku and his ciematographer Tôru Nakajima alternate between using a totally steady camera and a not very steady one like was uses in the Yakuza pictures, though the latter is mostly used in dialogue scenes which may strike some as odd; you’d have thought that Fukasaku would have brought in his name-making shakycam for a massacre scene, though I suppose he didn’t want to accentuate the intensity of the scene in a film clearly aimed at the kiddie element.

Limited edition reversible poster [2000 copies]

1080p HD presentation on Blu-ray from a restoration of the original film elements supplied by Toei
I doubt that this is a new restoration, and might be the same one used by America’s Shout Factory and Germany’s Subkultur Entertainment in 2016, though Eureka have probably given it a new encode. The grain is sometimes unevenly distributed and a few scratches and specks are visible, though nothing outstanding except for one shot which is decidedly out of focus – but that may well have been in the original elements. The image is detailed and actually less soft than you may expect in a film that has lots of opticals, which mostly still look rather good, indeed better than a lot which came after. Skin tones are perfect and of course all those garish costumes pop out. I’d like to see a new restoration of this film which depends so much on its visuals, though if this is the best we’re going to get it’s hardly worth complaining about. Maybe not great, but certainly good.

Optional English dubbed audio
I heard a few bits of this. It’s not bad as these things go, and some real voices are heard.

Optional English subtitles 

Brand new audio commentary by Tom Mes
This is probably the strongest track from Mes I’ve heard in a while, full of information on the film itself and lots of related subjects, while exuding a distinct fondness for it without breaking the relaxing, laid back nature that makes his tracks so distinctive. The lead-up to the production of Message From Space is especially interesting, with Toei, in a period when the studio stopped its assembly line exploitation stuff and looked towards Hollywood for inspiration, initially planning a Kaiju movie in space called Space Monster Devil Manta, then a live action Kamen Rider film. He also goes a lot into things like the curious but long-lasting back and forth of ideas and imitations between Japan, the United States and Italy, and political elements like the rejection of war by the young which this film shares with Fukasaku’s Battle Royale, though the most interesting bit to me was the French DVD redubbing the characters to sound like the ones in the Message From Space TV series which was hugely popular in France.

Ah! Massage From Space: an appreciation by Patrick Macias [13 mins]
Macias first saw this, his “favourite Japanese film of all time”, in a double bill with Starcrash. What a double bill that would have been, even if the US version of the latter lost a few minutes of silliness. He provides a few more interesting facts, such as the president of Toei at a press conference admitting that this was an answer to Star Wars and Morrow always being drunk, and as for the title of this fearurette – that will be explained too, i’a not a typo.

Message from Earth – archival documentary featuring interviews with Sonny Chiba and Kenta Fukasaku [30 mins]
imported from the Subkultur release, which also included a much shorter version of the film which was obviously released imn some countries, this is a rather fine “making of” documentary, with Kenjio’s son Kenta and Chiba speaking a surprising amount, and miniature man Shinji Haruma is here too, saying bow he and Najima would keep arguing over the time he was taking and the designs. Meanwhile Kenta recalls his first visit to the set at age 5 and not understanding how the people in the film were allowed to tell lies, wbileChiba praises him to the skies [and seems to be totally genuine about it] , despite his voice being so loud that he didn’t need a megaphone. The war aspect is again mentioned.

Reversible sleeve featuring original poster artwork

Stills galleries [3]

Trailers [3]

A collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Christopher Stewardson

Rather more than just a “Star Wars” rip-off,  “Message From Space” manages to be a very charming and at times rather wonderfully odd space adnture in its own right. Eureka give it a very nice release. Recommended!