Review: "It's cold inside, please wear a cape."

If only all aliens asked so little of us pathetic humans. "Please wear a cape." This line ricocheted in my mind and subsequently summed up the entirety of Ishiro Honda's THE MYSTERIANS in a handful of words. Honda's 1957 outing fits nicely into his oeuvre of timeless kaiju, sci-fi, and other various films, dating from '49 up to his final uncredited work in Kurosawa's DREAMS (1990) and MADADAYO (1993). Even over a decade after his death, Tohoscope classics such as this and the brain-buster MATANGO are quick to remind us why he's more than just "the man behind Godzilla."

The film itself is a mysterious beast, and is Toho's first movie dealing with "invaders from space." From the opening shot, you know you're in for a treat proportionate to how much you love optical printing, scale model UFOs, and other fantastic flashback effects. THE MYSTERIANS will make you long for the days when a landslide could be depicted by sinking balsa wood houses into a collapsable mound of dirt.

Regardless of how important plot may be, I can't help but be swallowed whole discussing Eiji Tsuburaya's effects. It's so tempting to switch over to the plight of the Mysterians and how it clashes with the decidedly egocentric humans' need for control over everything, but every time the train almost switches tracks, another vision of exploding saucers and melting tanks dances around in my head. Regardless, a story must be told, and THE MYSTERIANS is, at its core, all about the race for scientific progress. Though we may be offered a glimpse into the Mysterian's technology, we're far too quick to war with them. It's the ultimate exercise in male heroics when the entire world wants to launch a megaton massacre in response to the aliens' request for women and a small slice of land.

The Mysterians themselves look like they're sporting beefed up GORANGER outfits. Representing with a rainbow of colorful helmets and capes (the essential "wardrobe of the future"), the aliens are far from human, regardless of what the visible man-face behind the shaded visor may lead you to believe. This group is as cool, calm and collected as can be. They're the perfect contrast to the brash and impulsive humans that would sooner smear them across the surface than provide them with two square miles of land and some Earth women to copulate (read: make sexy) with. Of course, once the multi-colored spacesuit jockeys start snatching our finest babes, it's really time for war.

And what a war it is.

Hands down, the most memorable aspect of THE MYSTERIANS is not the acting (you'll be hard-pressed to remember who any of the characters were after the credits roll) or the plot (you could take it away, just leave me my sandbox full of toys). No sir, the fun and games remain entangled in the long and exciting battle scenes that pepper the film. This is full scale war with miniatures, soldier. A brass-filled soundtrack trumpets along to the beat of the pyrotechnic blaze. Dishes fire electric bolts with satisfyingly repetitive bra-bra-braps, army-men sized soldiers fall into pits, and tank-mounted cannons droop under the pressure blasted from an Earth-dwelling alien dome.

It's all very spectacular and epic, especially when dogfights between planes and saucers send flaming wreckage careening to unknown fates below. If all of this nerd-speak makes your toes curl, then you won't even want to hear about the pastel-painted rockets and the giant mole kaiju with the razor blade backpack. What's most impressive about THE MYSTERIANS (aside from all of the above) is that it hardly seems to lag between battles. Though the deliberations between Earth and the invading aliens may not be as gripping as "stuff getting blown up," there's an undeniable charm to the little things, like seeing Akihiko Hirata (quite the tokusatsu vet) decked out in goofy Mysterian gear.

The front of the DVD case hosts an intensely boastful blurb in the vein of the great Marvel comics covers of yesteryear that sported hyperbolic Stan Lee word bubbles: "THE GREATEST SCIENCE-FICTION PICTURE EVER CONCEIVED BY THE MIND OF MAN." While this may be somewhat of an exaggeration, are YOU gonna be the one to find out what happens to those that disagree?