DVD REVIEW: GOKE BODYSNATCHER FROM HELL
DVD REVIEW: KYUKETSUKI GOKEMIDORO
DVD REVIEW: NEW ENTERTAINMENT WORLD [ 2007 ] 81'
DVD REVIEW: AVG. BITRATE: 5.54 Mb/sec
DVD REVIEW: DISC FORMAT: REGION 0 / PAL / DVD-9
WTFFILM RATING:

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A passenger jet encounters a flying saucer, in the midst of a bomb threat and a hijacking by a political assassin, and crashes in a barren and lifeless stretch of land. Shortly thereafter, extraterrestrials from the planet Gokemidoro take possession of the assassin, turning him into a vampire. The constant conflict between the survivors over everything from water to scientific inquiry leaves them vulnerable to the assassin's attacks and blind to the real implications of the Gokemidoro's visit to Earth. . .

Hajime Sato's final film proposes a strange and frightening apocalyptic premise - that mankind, being consumed by his war-mongering tendencies, has been singled out for annihilation by a superior race of extraterrestrials who see us as little more than pests. The film bares remarkable similarities to NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD in terms of its overall storyline (a group of people find themselves unable to cope with one another, a shortcoming that leads to their demise at the hands of a hostile outside threat). The political subtext takes note of the hot-button issues of the day - international distaste with the Vietnam War as well as the recent assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.

GOKE overcomes its low budget roots and the stilted nature of much of its dialogue through loads of atmosphere, subtext, and an apocalyptic finale that is one of the more successful and memorable of its kind. Once largely overlooked, the Shochiku Co. ltd. production has gained a bit more recent interest thanks to its airing on the Turner Classic Movies cable network. An NTSC friendly American release has yet to come to pass, but this German offering from New Entertainment World will be more than enough to satisfy fans of the film capable of playing PAL discs.

THE FEATURE PRESENTATION:

New Entertainment World presents GOKE in a fantastic progressive and anamorphic 2.36:1 transfer, which has been properly converted for PAL playback. Colors and contrast look phenomenal throughout the main feature, but are most striking during the film's famous "blood red sky" opening. The image is quite sharp and I doubt much improvement could be made short of striking a new HD transfer of the film. I didn't notice any damage to the print save for a few speckles here and there - I'd be hard pressed to say that GOKE has ever looked better on home video. The encoding is top notch and I didn't spot any compression issues at all during the feature's running time.

Wisely seeing a market for their disc beyond the German border (or perhaps just being obsessive completists like myself), New Entertainment World has included not one but three Dolby Digital 2.0 audio options for the feature. Purists will be happy to find that the film's original Japanese audio is preserved and sounds quite fantastic for being 40 years old. Equally impressive is the German track for the film, which may be a shade superior (in terms of overall fidelity) to the Japanese track. Those of you who grew up watching this on the television in the 1970's will be delighted to find that the English dub track has been included as well. Sadly, this track sounds to have been sourced from a poor tape source and is nowhere close to the quality of the other tracks provided. That said, it's still entirely listenable.

Finishing out the feature presentation are 3 sets of subtitles, two in German and one (unadvertised on the DVD box) in English. Aside from a few slight grammatical inaccuracies, the English subtitles are consistent with those provided by Janus Films when they aired the film on Turner Classic Movies not too long ago. This is a very very strong feature presentation and quite possibly the best the film has ever gotten on home video - even besting the R2 Japanese discs from Shochiku by providing multiple audio and subtitle options.

THE EXTRAS:

First up is the film's Japanese trailer, presented in a progressive and anamorphic transfer. This shows more damage than the film itself (understandably) but is still in very good condition being as old as it is. Next up is an image gallery featuring the beautifully designed German lobby cards for the film as well as a number of posters (German, American, and two international posters prepared by Shochiku Co. itself). A collection of six trailers for unrelated efforts (including some Italian actioners and Jimmy Wang Yu's THE MAN FROM HONG KONG) round out the extras accessible from your set top player.

Catering to audiences with access to a DVD-ROM drive, New Entertainment World has provided substantial computer-access content. First up are all the images provided in the image gallery, now available in their original high resolution for you to do with as you please. Also provided is a downloadable .mp4 version of the film for playback on your iPod. Unfortunately this is an unsubbed version with only German audio available, making it of limited use to English speaking viewers.

Though I always find myself wishing for more, the extras provided for this release are just fine and the full resolution lobby cards and posters definitely sweeten the deal as far as I'm concerned.

THE OVERALL PRESENTATION:

Just like my previously reviewed CMV Laservision release of GAPPA, GOKE comes housed in an impressive book style case with three different available styles of cover art (I chose Cover style A, which features one of the Shochiku produced international posters for the film as its cover - you can view that poster at the end of this section). The back cover is very well designed and features several iconic images from the film itself, including that of a man being engulfed by the orange light of a flying saucer. All of the necessary information - synopsis, features, disc type, etc. - is presented in an efficient and very aesthetically pleasant manner, leaving me to wonder why higher end companies on this side of the pond can't produce the same quality of work as a smaller capacity German DVD production house.

Menus are animated and well designed, making it easy for even non-German viewers to access whatever options they desire. A minor caveat is that the subtitles tracks are not accessible through the menu, only during playback (not a major problem). The creepy sound effects associated with the flying saucers in the film play in the background of the menu designs. The menu designs could have been handled with a bit more class, but this is just nitpicking - there are no honest complaints here on my part.

THE VERDICT:

All told, this is an amazingly solid 4-star release (I was tempted to offer it 4 and a half) from New Entertainment World. I'm unsure of what the copyright status for GOKE is in the United States, but I know that Janus Films is handling its television and theater distribution at present. Perhaps that means that a Criterion or Image Entertainment release of the film is somewhere on the distant horizon, hopefully with a new hi-def transfer. Until that day arrives, however, this is definitely the best English-friendly option for owning the film.

An excellent transfer, terrific audio and subtitle options, well compiled supplemental material, and a relatively low retail price (this can be had for around $20 USD) make this a real no-brainer for anyone looking to pick up this title on DVD. WTFFILM can't recommend it highly enough.