A fiendish vampire from a strange world in outer space drains his victims' blood and turns them into weird corpses!
Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell is a 1968 Japanese Sci-Fi Horror film, directed by Hajime Soto.
A plane in flight is notified of a bomb threat called in. Later it's revealed that the bomb threat is a hoax, but the pilots are told to return to the airport. This leads one of the passengers, a man in a white suit, to pull a gun and hijack the plane, demanding that they fly to Okinawa. It turns out that the man in the white suit is an assassin who is trying to make his escape after assassinating the British minister.
The plane heads for Okinawa but the pilots soon see a scary glowing light in the sky. The oncoming light causes the plane to crash. The survivors include: Hirofumi Teraoka, the hijacker; Sugisaka, the co-pilot; Kazumi Asakura, the beautiful stewardess; Tsuyoshi Mano, a slimy corrupt politician; Tokuyasu and Noriko Tokuyasu, an arms dealer and his wife; Momotake, a psychiatrist; Matsumiya, a young man who turns out to have called in the bomb threat; and Mrs. Neal, an American who was headed to Okinawa to retrieve the remains of her husband, a soldier killed in Vietnam.
The hijacker attempts to make his escape after the plane crash, dragging Kazumi along as a hostage. But the two of them soon run into an alien spacecraft, and a mysterious gooey blob rips a tear in the hijacker's head and crawls into his skull...
The film is part of The Criterion Collection, as part of Eclipse Series 37.
This film contains examples of:
- Antagonist Title
- Arms Dealer: Tokuyasu, whose company exports weapons and who is very happy about the war in Southeast Asia. He has bribed Mano the politician for a defense contract.
- Asshole Victim: Among the Gokemidoro's victims is a terrorist, a manipulative psychologist, a Corrupt Corporate Executive who sold his wife off to be raped for political connections, and the Corrupt Politician who accepted the executive's deal.
- Big Bad: The Gokemidoro, a body-snatching alien out to exterminate the human race.
- Blob Monster: The Gokemidoro, when they are outside of a human host, are gross gooey blobs.
- Coincidental Broadcast: One passenger turns on a transistor radio just in time to hear a news report saying that authorities have no idea where their plane crashed, and have no hope of survivors.
- Corrupt Politician: Mano, a member of the Japanese Senate. Tokuyasu was bribing him with a lot of money for a defense contract. His wife, Noriko Tokuyasu, was part of the bribe, which is why he is strangely unbothered when he finds Mano crawling all over her.
- Creepy Crows: The raven that has landed in the cockpit of the plane almost immediately after it crashed is certainly not a good omen.
- Disc-One Final Boss: For the first twenty minutes, our heroes have to deal with a plane hijacking committed by assassin Hirofumi Teraoka. Just after they land, space vampire Gokemidoro takes Teraoka's body and Big Bad status.
- Disney Villain Death: Dr. Momotake, a psychologist who enjoys putting people in stressful situations, gets in an argument with another survivor, during which he slips and falls off a cliff to his seeming death. He actually survives, only for the Gokemidoro to kill him.
- Downer Ending: The last two survivors escape the alien, only to find the nearby city massacred. As they look up into the skies, the alien invasion force carries, and turns Earth into a blackened husk.
- Dwindling Party: The survivors of the plane crash are offed one at a time, most of them by the creature that has taken over the body of the hijacker.
- Everybody's Dead, Dave: The Downer Ending. Sugisaka and Kazumi make the surprisingly short trek from the mountaintop to civilization, only to find a world of the dead, everyone having been killed and drained of blood by the Gokemidoro.
- Evil-Detecting Dog: Birds instinctively flee from the Gokemidoro, even when doing so is certain death.
- Flyaway Shot: An extreme version. The camera shows Sugisaka and Kazumi on a rocky beach, then flies away until they become tiny specks—then flies further away to show the Earth in deep space. This sets up the last shot where the Gokemidoro fleet of spaceships arrives to complete the extermination of the human race.
- Flying Saucer: The Gokemidoro fly around in a flying saucer that glows orange.
- For Science!: Momotake the psychiatrist and academic is only too eager to chuck Matsumiya outside of the plane, just to see what happens when the possessed hijacker gets to him.
- Gasoline Dousing: Sugisaka managed to momentarily subdue Goke, who's inhabiting the hijacker's body, by dumping a bucket of airplane fuel and throwing a lit lighter. It works, until Goke abandons the body.
- Gory Deadly Overkill Title of Fatal Death: Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell
- Greater-Scope Villain: There are more Gokemidoro, with the one we see only being one of a massive invasion force. They show up at the end to destroy the Earth.
- The Hero Dies: Sugisaka and Kazumi are [presumably] annihilated with the rest of humanity by the aliens.
- Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Mrs. Neal pulls the trigger on the rifle several times, aiming at the hijacker who is maybe six feet away. She misses completely, although since the hijacker is now basically a flesh suit possessed by Gokemidoro, it probably doesn't make a difference.
- Kill All Humans: The Gokemidoro has decided to annihilate all of humanity.
- Kill It with Fire: Sugisaka eventually defeats the hijacker by dousing him with gasoline and throwing a lighter—except that it doesn't really work, as the Gokemidoro blob simply evacuates its meat puppet, leaving Teraoka's corpse behind to burn.
- No Body Left Behind: The Gokemidoro's hosts crumble to dust when abandoned.
- Our Vampires Are Different: These are aliens that possess humans to drink blood. When they aren't in a host, they resemble blue, pulsating slime.
- Psycho Psychologist: One of the plane crash survivors is a psychologist who enjoys putting people in terrible situations to see how they react to them.
- Puppeteer Parasite: The main antagonists are a bunch of alien invaders who possess bodies to drink blood.
- Red Sky, Take Warning: The pilots are weirded out when the sky they are flying through becomes an apocalyptic blood red. This is of course the first sign of the coming of the aliens.
- Significant Background Event: Noriko frantically struggles in the background with Teraoka while Mrs. Neal and Kazumi the stewardess lounge in seats in the foreground.
- Spell My Name Withan S: Shochiku chose Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell as their English title, but the name of the alien characters is "Gokemidoro" and the shortened word "Goke" is never said.
- Token White: Neal, the American passenger whose husband died in Vietnam, is the film's sole white character. All her dialogue is in English, which the Japanese characters seem to understand.
- Troll: The film starts with the co-pilot and a flight attendant checking the plane's bags for a bomb, which is soon revealed to not exist. The passenger Matsumiya called in the threat to the police as a joke (it's left unexplained as to why he called this threat in to the plane he was on). Although later, it is revealed Matsumiya did have a bomb on his person.
- Villain in a White Suit: Teraoka is dressed in an all-white suit. That's creepy enough when he is a gun-toting hijacker, but even more creepy when he's possessed by the Gokemidoro and becomes a zombie vampire.
- Voice of the Legion: The Goke speaks with a deep echo when inhabiting a human body, while referring to themselves as "we"."Humans, you cannot understand our language. So we are using this woman's body to convey our intentions..."
