Wednesday, May 13, 2020

A Quick Look: WARNING FROM SPACE (1956 - color)


   WARNING FROM SPACE was one of the earlier Japanese experiments in genre pictures. Influenced by American films like WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE, the film tells of creatures from another world who come to Earth in order to help prevent a cosmic catastrophe that will be caused by another planetary body crashing into ours. In order to move about on Earth, one of the Martians is camouflaged as a pretty young woman. Unfortunately, it gets a little pokey in the second half, but it's an interesting watch. One thing that did stand out to me was that the film was apparently planned to be in wide scope. The footage aboard the alien spacecraft was shot this way. Then, it must've been decided that the film should be released in academy ratio, because the rest of the movie is shot that way and the alien scenes are cropped! For whatever reason, it didn't make American release until almost a decade later, when it turned up as a television feature. Press stills featured gigantic starfish-like monsters wading through flooded cityscapes, but no such scene appears in the film itself -which features rather more benevolent Martians than the publicity images indicate.

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