REVIEW: OGON BATTO (GOLDEN BAT)
REVIEW: HAJIME SATO [ 1966 ] 72'
REVIEW: TOEI CO. LTD
CAST: SONNY CHIBA, HIROSHI NAKATA
CAST: ANDREW HUGHES, REIKO KASAHARA

Poor young Akira - after spending night after night star gazing and single-handedly discovering that the planet Icarus is on a collision course with Earth, no one in the grown-up world believes him. The police think he has an overactive imagination and the astronomers at the local observatory simply refuse to take his claim seriously for no reason other than that it sounds silly. Just when Akira's day can't seem to get any worse, a group of sunglass-and-suit donning henchmen show up and drag him to an isolated chateaus in the Japanese Alps.

There he discovers something he never though possible - an uber-cool super lab funded by the UN under the cover name of the Pearl Institute and existing, seemingly, for the sole purpose of spying on amateur Japanese astronomers, building fantastical weapons (the Super Destruction Beam Cannon!), and saving the Earth from threats like, say, renegade planetary bodies under the control of evil spacemen. After a brief introduction to the facility by Dr. Yamatone (Sonny Chiba!), Akira agrees to join forces with them. The first order of business is to complete the Super Destruction Beam Cannon by locating appropriate material from which to fashion a lens.

But alas, the party sent out to collect the appropriate lens material have vanished! The team, headed by Dr. Yamatone and an incredibly gruff old white guy (Andrew Hughes, of DESTROY ALL MONSTERS fame), depart in their super flying car - which never drives, funnily enough, leaving one to wonder just what makes it a car in the first place - to the last known whereabouts of the research party. There, in an out-of-the-way corner of the Pacific, they discover an uncharted island (identified as part of the lost continent of Atlantis!) littered with Greco-Roman architecture and the bodies of the research team. Before our heroes can even ponder what might have killed off the crew, an enormous drill bit with a face erupts from the ocean and begins shooting laser beams and goons in black felt suits at them.

Dr. Yamatone and company are forced to take refuge in a cave, in which they discover a sarcophagus containing the Golden Bat - some sort of protector sealed in the sarcophagus 10,000 years previously so that he might fend off a terrible threat to mankind in the future. Even weirder, he carries in his mummified hand the very lens material the group needs to finish the Super Destruction Beam Cannon! Emily, daughter of the old gruff guy, has the brains to see that spacemen piloting giant drill bits around the ocean and trying to clobber her home world with another planet just might be the terrible threat mentioned on the sarcophagus' inscription and awakens the mighty Golden Bat with a few drops of water to the chest.

And just in time - the felt-dressed goons have arrived at the cave in force and seem determined to kill off Dr. Yamatone and the rest of the group. Have no fear, as Golden Bat and his trusty baton of justice are there to save the day! Cackling maniacally all the while, Golden Bat takes to causing the multitude of goons a multitude of humiliating deaths, be it from being beaten with his trusty baton or shot in the neck by the laser beams it fires from its tip. Having saved the day, Golden Bat gives Emily a creepy bat pendant and a promise that he'll be there for her whenever she might need him*. And help she will need, as the evil Nazo, the four-eyed cyborg rat thing in charge of the evil spacemen still has every intention of slamming Icarus into Earth, Golden Bat or not . . .

GOLDEN BAT is a Toei production based more or less faithfully on the manga (once helmed by Osamu Tezuka, of ASTRO BOY fame) featuring the character that appeared post World War II. Golden Bat himself dates back further still, to the very beginning of the 1930s, when he was created by Takeo Nagamatsu. This 1966 Toei effort marked the first feature-film outing for Golden Bat and, like most of the Toei super hero productions of the time, was obviously budgetarily constrained. That does not, however, keep it from being a whole lot of fun.

One of the most amusing aspects of the Hajime Sato (GOKE: BODYSNATCHER FROM HELL) helmed production is the fact that the heroes of the film are almost universally more frightening than the villains - the gruff American leading the Pearl Institute speaks perpetually in angry-sounding Japanese dubbing and the institute's sunglass-wearing suit-toting mystery henchmen definitely give Nazo's goons a run for their money. And then, of course, there is the star of the show, himself. From the get go, Golden Bat comes across as seriously disturbed, less because of the skull he has for a head than because of his tendency to maniacally cackle at even the most inappropriate of moments.

Nazo, by comparison, is something of a disappointment. Envisioned in the manga as an amorphous black figure with a flying saucer for a lower body, claw for a hand, and four laser-shooting eyes, he looks more or less like a stunt man trapped inside of a suede pillow case in the film. His three evil henchman - Keloid (who looks like he once suffered from cystic acne), Piranha (a totally hot Japanese chick with the power to disguise herself as other totally hot Japanese chicks), and Jackal (something of a low-rent take on Marvel's Wolverine) - fare a bit better but are still never as threatening as the heroes.

And what a hero Golden Bat is! From his groovy one-liners ("Receive the baton of justice!") to his constant posing to the endless amusement he takes from fending off bad guy after bad guy with his mighty baton, Golden Bat is nothing but pure and undiluted awesome. It's impossible not to enjoy the film when he's bounding across the screen.

The narrative that revolves around the many Golden Bat combat sequences is pure late 60's tokusatsu nonsense that centers on the importance of the Super Destruction Beam Cannon and sees endless attempts by the villains to capture key components of it and render it useless to us Earthlings. Along the way, Nazo and his goons have key Earth personnel duplicated, tortured, and tossed from high places. It's nothing short of a minor miracle that GOLDEN BAT pipes so much plot into a running time of barely 70 minutes.

Hajime Sato, who would direct TERROR BENEATH THE SEA (another Sonny Chiba action vehicle for Sonny Chiba) that same year as well as the aforementioned GOKE BODY SNATCHER FROM HELL, keeps the action moving at a breakneck pace throughout, leaving audience members little time to ponder the inanity of the events taking place. Sato would disappear from the film scene after GOKE, a real pity given his ability to produce such entertaining efforts with such limited resources.

The cast for the film includes a number of familiar faces other than that of Sonny Chiba. Andrew Hughes appears briefly as the assassinated politician in GOKE and had roles of varying stature in a multitude of Toho films in the 1960's. Interestingly enough, he appears to have gotten his start in acting by successfully defending a number of military men accused of war crimes after World War II - they showed him their gratitude by securing roles for him in Japanese film productions. Reiko Kasahara, who plays the female team member taken captive by Piranha, will be familiar to any fan of the original Gamera series - she starred in GAMERA VS. GAOS, GAMERA VS. ZIGRA, and, probably most famously, played two roles in GAMERA VS. GUIRON. Another familiar name is that of the film's composer, Shinsuke Kikuchi, who lent his considerable talents to a number of Gamera films, GOKE, and a multitude of other productions, including various DRAGONBALL Z incarnations, all the way through the year 2000.

GOLDEN BAT is an unabashedly insane exercise in high camp that should prove accessible in some small way to nearly everyone, though I suspect it would play best with the younger audiences it was obviously intended for. The special effects are generally awful, save for a few moments here and there, but never detract from the fun of things. Imaginative and cartoony in a way that live-action films will never be again, GOLDEN BAT has quickly become a standby in the WTFFILM household.

Highly recommended.

* This point seems oddly in line with Shusuke Kaneko's 90's entries into the Gamera series. The fact that they also feature a hero left to us by Atlantians who creates a special bond between himself and a young girl seems too much to be just coincidence.