Hooray for the electro-barrier!

One evening a group of friends are using a telescope and watching for a returning satellite. What they see is a space ship. Being idiots they run out looking for it. They find the spaceship has landed in a near-by field. The children are surrounded by aliens. Suddenly a caped and masked man flies up in a combo space ship/batmobile. The super hero beats away the aliens and saves the children. Not knowing who he is the children call him “Space Chief”.

Unknown to anyone the secret identity of Space Chief is Scientist Shinichi Tachibana (Sonny Chiba). He works for the government and is involved in creating an electronic barrier to keep the Neptune Men at bay. The barrier works for awhile.

The aliens manage to finally break through our defenses and attack the Earth. Cities are destroyed by the alien mothership along with their smaller fighter ships. The Earth is in a panic. The only hope left is Space Chief and a last ditch effort by forces on the ground using specialized missiles.

“Invasion of the Neptune Men” was released in 1961 in Japan and was directed by Koji Ohta. The movie never had a theatrical release in the US but was shown on American television. It is one of many Japanese science fiction movies referred to as space operas. The movie came out a couple years after “Prince of Space” and was produced by Toei Company. In the Japanese version of the movie the hero’s name is Iron Sharp.

The Neptune men wear what looks like Robby the Robot heads and silver-lame jumpsuits. Outside of the electronic message they never talk. They actually do look kinda cool. They may be able to build a space ship that can fly from Neptune to Earth but they couldn’t fight their way out of a paper bag. Sonny Chiba’s marshal arts moves are virtually lost on them since all he really has to do is breath on them and they fall down. Of course the movie was long before Sonny became well know for all his expertise in marshal arts movies.

The first half of the movie is lame. The writing is bad, the acting is bad, the special effects are bad, the kids are annoying. All together it’s worse than “Prince of Space”. Since it was made for children, I don’t think anyone cared. That was the first half.

The second half is quite different. When the Neptune men destroy the cities the devastation is quite graphic. It looks to me as if they used stock footage from either a disaster movie or news reels. The second half seems like a different movie. It still has bad acting, writing and annoying kids, but it also has explosions and devastation.

All in all it’s not as good as “Space Prince” but the second half does a lot to make up for it.

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