Customer Reviews

Warning from Space

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This is a little known Japanese oddity from 1956 originally released in Japan as 'Uchujin Tokyo Ni Awawaru' ('Unknown Satellite Over Tokyo'.) I had never heard of this one, but Amazon recommended it to me, doubtlessly due to my previous B-Movie purchases. I am really glad I bought this obscure little film.

The plot concerns a close call with a runaway planet on a collision course with the Earth, and the space travelers that look like giant starfish with one big blue eye that help save humanity from the peril. This film is serious, and most of it is well made considering the special effects capabilities available fifty years ago. There are a few places where the plot falters (for example why bother to evacuate Tokyo when the pending collision will destroy the whole Earth?), but overall it is an interesting mid-fifties sci-fi classic, with additional and unexpected bonuses, such as a musical stage show interlude, which seems out of place, but adds to the fun.

For enthusiasts of old B-Movies this is a relatively unknown treasure at a very affordable price. The alien costumes and dialogue alone are worth the price of admission!

This beauty had my name written all over it. First we had the terrible costumes of space aliens that were shaped like starfish. Starfish that had a giant flourescent eye smack dab in the middle of their bodies, and they had no arms or usable appendages, so they were psychic. Second, there were the state of the art special effects, like the gold spray painted cardboard that made up the space aliens' fleet. Third, there was the completely unbelievable plot. Let's see, a planet from another galaxy that is sort of like a star in the sense that it is really hot, is coming straight at Tokyo. An alien race (those starfish cyclops things) is trying to warn the world, but everyone just freaks out whenever they see these guys (Doesn't anyone own an aquirium?) so that the starfish people have to morph into really almost semi-attractive Japanese girls to get old nutty scientists to notice them. On top of all that, the film was dubbed into english.

The best part about this film is that it was a serious effort. The acting is that of deep drama and intensity. The special effects are used a tremendous amount (strangely enough, the effects even get better as the movie goes on). The viewer even begins to share concern with the characters as their acting careers end tragically.

But alas, this movie is terrible. During one scene (the "Panic Scene") people are seen fleeing Tokyo for no reason whatsoever. There are images of people jumping off moving trains, the police chief of Tokyo decides to have the city evacuated. It's an illogical order as the Earth is being threatened by A PLANET, moving away from Tokyo is not going to help much. In fact, after the one eyed aliens make contact with the Japenese scientists, the viewer spends the rest of the film completely confused. The aliens come and go as they please, only appearing when really, really necessary. But, thankfully (spoiler ahead) everything turns out fine, except for the millions of people killed by heat stroke and panic.

It's one of those movies that is so bad you have to see it.

Actors in cloth, star-shaped costumes stand around on their spaceship a lot, communicating with each other telepathically. They eventually begin standing around in Tokyo, trying to warn everyone that a runaway planet is heading toward earth. One star-shaped entity assumes the form of a female nightclub tap-dancer (!) in order to contact the scientific community. From there it gets hazy, as my eyes glazed over. This movie is a true test of endurance! See if you can make it to the end without entering dreamland...

I bought this because it looked like it might be hilariously stupid. Unfortunately, it's merely boringly stupid. Once you have a good laugh at the starfish costumes, that's about it. During the movie I found myself critiquing the quality of the dubbing (which is quite good, actually) because there just isn't anything going on worth paying attention to.

Overall, I'd say the quality of this movie is about the same as the quality of the reviews here. 'Color film wasn't perfected when this movie was made'? 'This is an early attempt at colorization'? Come on, people. It's simply a public domain movie and no one spent any effort beyond copying the first faded print they could find to DVD.

I simply have to love Alpha Video's cover art. I should add another star because the cover is so spectacular, but the movie itself really is a stinker.

Here we are in Tokyo when mysterious spaceships appear. The beings on the space ship appear on earth, causing general panic. The aliens look like people-sized felt stars with an eye about where earthlings have stomachs. I kept wondering how the star-shaped beings manipulated objects since they have no hands. Anyway, the star-shaped space beings (which kind of challenges you to say ten times real fast) are trying to warn earthlings that a planet is going to crash into earth and destroy the earth before much longer. Of course, who would believe a bunch of aliens who look like refugees from a Starbrite movie?

The aliens are quick thinkers, and they decided to change one of themselves into a hot (well, I suppose she was hot in 1956, which is coincidentally the year I was born, in Japan) babe singer. The aliens then try to get support to help blow up the planet.

Naturally the politicians take over so that the planet can get really close so that the tension will build and then the aid will be authorized too late so that things will get really hot and then someone will take action but it will be too late but of course the hero will reveal the magical solution that will save the world but only after Tokyo gets destroyed, again. That is pretty much the whole movie, in a sentence.

This movie was actually okay, but too many story lines in too short a time muddled the movie. We had children and scientists and aliens and mobsters and the military and the politicians and then there were everyday citizens. I started to feel like I was in one of those television shows where there were a million stories, and they vainly tried to cram them all into one movie. The movie also managed to cram in some nature shots too. Had the movie eliminated some of the story lines and focused on a couple of central characters, this movie could have gone somewhere. Instead, our main character sat out a month after gangsters tied him up so that we could watch children crying and a rat running for a crack in the wall; pretty heady stuff. I kept wondering how the main character had disappeared for 30 days, apparently tied up, and was still alive.

I still think this movie had some charm, and if I saw it on television I might reminisce fondly about those felt star people. However, I hesitate to recommend this movie except to those people who enjoy low budget Japanese science fiction movies from the 1950s. Since this movie is missing its typical monsters (Godzilla would have benefited this movie - "Godzilla and the Star People") it is less interesting than other movies from this era involving Godzilla and his brethren, and even hard-core fans of those types of Japanese movies may be disappointed. On the other hand, if you are having trouble getting to sleep, this movie might give you some help. Good luck!

Where has this film been? The conversion to English is great, leaving the film largely intact. The print/color is poor. An early attempt at colorization. Still, it's a great movie, easily ranking with the original Japanese version of Godzilla.

get this in the triple feature its a beter deal look for triple feature scifi voyages in outer space classics its the same movie plus 2 others same quality same company for a beter value it includes warning from space with voyage to the prehistoric planet,and assighnment outerspace all 3 worth buying and saves space in collection.

Originally released in Japan as Uchûjin Tokyo ni arawaru and then exported to parts unknown (well, here, in the US mainly, possibly as revenge over that whole atomic bomb thing), Warning from Space (1956) aka The Cosmic Man Appears in Tokyo aka The Mysterious Satellite aka Space Men Appear in Tokyo aka Spacepeople Appear in Tokyo aka Unknown Satellite Over Tokyo (whew!) is basically 88 minutes of a lot of ho-hum boredom. I'm not kidding, I literally fell asleep during this film. The last time that happened was during the wretchedly awful CGI bloated crud picture Octopus (2000). Am I saying Warning from Space is as bad as Octopus? No, but in terms of a celluloid sleeping pill, the two are certainly comparable.

Okay, so what's the movie about? Well, let's see...strange goings on over the skies of Tokyo which appear to be meteors or asteroids or some such thing are actually flying saucers containing very odd alien beings who are basically man-sized starfish with one giant eye where you'd think their stomachs would be...it seems the aliens are from a planet whose orbit is tied to Earth's, and they've come because there's a runaway planet headed for a collision course with the Earth, marking it for destruction, along with their own world. Since their survival is tied to ours, they've decided to try and help us, combining their technology with our...good old fashion Earth work ethic? Really, I am unsure why they even bothered to come here instead to just dealing with the problems themselves. I mean, if they can master interplanetary travel, what the heck do they need with us anyway (actually, we do find out later)? Okay, so the only problem, besides the huge errant planet hurtling through space set to squash us good, is their odd appearance that keeps freaking people out whenever they try to make contact, so they decide to utilize their transmutation machine, which actually changes the aliens' appearance so they can look like us. So anyway, the aliens plan is to get the Earth to use all of its' nuclear weapons, launch them at the rogue planet, and hopefully divert it's course. Seem plausible? Maybe back in the 50's it was...does the plan work? I guess you'll just have to watch and see...

So what did I like about this movie? Well, the starfish alien creatures certainly were different, but given that they used a machine to make them look like humans, we didn't see much of them. The special effects we actually pretty good, taken in context with the time the movie was made. And I especially liked the huge chunk of exposition about 50 minutes into the movie that basically defined all the pertinent elements within the film up until that point, disguised as a radio broadcast. This was particularly useful as my attention tended to drift a due to boredom and the fact that I fell asleep for like 10 minutes or so and didn't feel like going back and watching what I missed.

Okay, what didn't I like about the film? Well, it ran too long, in my opinion. The 88-minute run time could have been effectively reduced by about 20 minutes and we would have not lost anything important to the story. And let me ask you this...why does it seem like nearly every Japanese movie I've seen has to have some extremely clumsy, awkward, nerdy-type guy with an excruciatingly nasally, annoying voice to act as a sort of comic relief? In this case, the character presents himself as some type of junior reporter type you'd expect to have the nickname of `Scoop' or some such nonsense. I know certain things are universal, but this kind of `comedy' is lost on me. The good news is that character has a very short amount of screen time. At least the cinematic gods were kind in that aspect. Also, proportional to the running time, the story just moved along way too slowly. There were a couple of odd musical segments in the film, but they weren't overly emphasized, thankfully, and kept pretty short. Certain elements of the plot didn't really make sense like if you're an alien and you're changing your appearance to blend in and make contact with specific Earthlings, would you really choose the appearance of seemingly famous pop star? Oh well...also, did you know there was such a thing as the Supreme Headquarters of the World Council? Apparently there is...I have no idea what their responsibilities involve, but I do know they seem to be able to suspend activities in launching artificial satellites into orbit.

The quality of the print provided by Alpha Video on this disc is pretty poor, but watchable, especially given the price of the DVD. The movie is in color, but the quality of the color is very poor, most likely due to color in movies was as new and not yet perfected feature back when this movie originally came out. The audio is pretty much in line with the quality of the picture, but again, given the cost of the DVD, I wasn't really surprised. Not much in the way of special features, with the exception of a listing of other releases from Alpha Video including many pictures of the covers of said releases. I give Alpha credit on the marketing of their low budget releases. They may not put a lot of money inside the DVDs, but they sure provide glossy and attractive covers for their releases.

Cookieman108

Brought this because it was cheap. I paid five bucks, still felt ripped-off. This is one boring movie. Something about a starfish from space warning people. There's alot of japanese giant monster classics that have not been release. Why this! If you'er a g-fan like me, stay with Godzilla, and Gamera. Starfish with one big eye c'mon.

This is the kind of thing I would watch when I had time to waste as a kid: it has monsters (kind of waddling stars with an eye in the middle), quirky details (they choose Japan to communicate with earthlings), and a bigger theme (don't want to play the spoiler, but it isn't what you're led to think).

The execution is laughably clunky - campy and yet not so bad that it spoils the concept. The acting is also mediocre, but passable. Recommended, even if it is not classic, for afficianados of good bad scifi.