is a 1967 Japanese science fiction kaiju film directed by Kazui Nihonmatsu, and stars Eiji Okada and Toshiya Wazaki.
Stock footage of the monster Guilala from the film was reused in the 2008 comedy film Monster X Strikes Back: Attack the G8 Summit.
Plot The spaceship AAB Gamma is dispatched from Japan to the planet Mars to investigate reports of UFOs seen near the Red Planet. When the spaceship arrives, it encounters one of the UFOs, which suddenly sprays the AAB Gamma with spores. A sample of the spores is returned to Earth, where one of them begins to develop.
The spore is accidentally exposed to acid, and grows into a giant creature that is named "Guilala". It continues to feed on any kind of energy source, and grows bigger and more powerful. The monster begins a reign of destruction through Tokyo. It spits fireballs, feeds on nuclear fuel, turns into a flaming orb to travel great distances by air in mere minutes, and destroys all aircraft and tanks in its path. Guilala is finally defeated by fighter jets laden with bombs, which coat it in a substance called "Guilalanium", a substance that prevents it from absorbing energy. This causes Guilala to shrink down to its original spore form. Stored in a glass container filled with Guilalanium, it is rendered permanently harmless. The government promptly launches it back into space, where it will orbit the Sun in a nigh-inescapable heliocentric orbit for the foreseeable future.
Production The X from Outer Space and Gappa: The Triphibian Monster by Nikkatsu were produced and released simultaneously by different companies. Both shared similarities in production systems, being produced by the company Japan Tokusatsu Production and involving Eiji Tsuburaya's teams. Both films were among the non-Daiei kaiju projects that received tax-based governmental loans that resulted from the Daiei president and Gamera co-writer Masaichi Nagata's attempt to export Japanese films, especially of the kaiju and tokusatsu genres, for the purpose of attracting foreign currencies to revive the declining Japanese cinema. Both films became a part of the social phenomena , which was formed through these governmental promotions.
Under the influence of the Six-Company Agreement (Five-Company Agreement), which was led by Masaichi Nagata, Tsuburaya's involvement in The X from Outer Space and Gappa: The Triphibian Monster wasn't publicly announced, although his participation was apparent to filmmakers.
Cast as Captain K. Sano as Michiko Taki as H. Miyamoto Eiji Okada as Dr. Katō Ryūji Kita as Emergency operations center chief Takanobu Hozumi as FAFC technical officer Noriyuki Watanabe as FAFC operator Jun Kashima as FAFC operator as Lisa Schneider (Japanese voice actor: Reiko Mutō) Franz Gruber as Dr. Berman (Japanese voice actor: Tamio Ōki) as Dr. Stein (Japanese voice actor: Teiji Ōmiya) as Dr. M. Shioda as Mr. Kimura Hiroshi Fujioka as Moon base worker Sōnosuke Oda as Moon base worker Kōji Nakata as Kamon Kawamura as Electrical substation worker as Guilala
Release The X From Outer Space was released in Japan on 25 March 1967. The film was never released theatrically in the United States, but instead was released directly to television in 1968 by American International Television.
The Criterion Collection released The X from Outer Space on DVD through their Eclipse label in a boxed set entitled When Horror Came to Shochiku (which also includes Goké, Body Snatcher from Hell, The Living Skeleton and Genocide). This DVD set offers both an English subtitled and a dubbed version of the film. This boxed set was released on November 20, 2012.
Reception Film historian Chuck Stephens described the film as having "a well-deserved reputation as one of the silliest and, as a consequence, most beloved rubber-suit monster movies ever made". Sight & Sound described the film as a "harebrained kaiju epic" that was "Cheesy, rich in comic non sequiturs and scored with an unpredictable mishmash of 1960s pop and bossa nova. X fits comfortably into one's stoned best-bad-movie rental evening". Author and film critic Glenn Erickson characterized the film as "simply... terrible," describing the monster as "a preposterous concoction, [being] a 20-story chicken with a head shaped like a jet plane." Writing for Turner Classic Movies, critic Nathaniel Thompson wrote that the film "offers a substantial amount of entertainment value (and unintentional humor), thanks to its dual menaces of a gloppy space entity and a rampaging chicken monster," and included a "jaw-dropping and vaguely pornographic dispatching of the beast at the end."
Legacy
There existed unsuccessful film remake attempts in the 1990s. Among the revivals of Godzilla and Gamera, Shochiku launched a Guilala project by appointing Kazuyuki Izutsu and , however the project was terminated during the process of evaluation. Shortly after, proposed Keita Amemiya to direct a remake after the completion of (1997). Following Amemiya's resignation, Okuyama attempted to continue the project by appointing another director, yet the Guilala reboot faced another cancellation. Consequently, Monster X Strikes Back: Attack the G8 Summit (2008) was produced about a decade after.
Several Shochiku-related projects have utilized stock footages and props of the 1967 film, and had introduced cameo appearances of the kaiju Guilala, such as in The Bad News Bears Go to Japan (1978), Tora-san's Forbidden Love (1984), and Boys Be Ambitious (1996) by aforementioned Kazuyuki Izutsu. Guilala was also used as a mascot by the amusement park , which was located within the . With the release of the 2008 remake, its director Minoru Kawasaki produced a specialized installment to feature The X from Outer Space, and Guilala appeared in a television commercial by the American staffing agency Ladders, Inc.
Guilala has also been featured and referenced among other mediums, such as and in the Showa era, the popular manga series KochiKame: Tokyo Beat Cops,, Natsuhiko Kyogoku's novel series USO Makoto Yōkai Hyaku Monogatari,Natsuhiko Kyogoku, 2018, USO Makoto Yōkai Hyaku Monogatari, "Kyu", 373–375, Kadokawa and so on.
See also Gappa: The Triphibian Monster List of Japanese films of 1967 List of science fiction films of the 1960s
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