Hung-Min Chen

(In French, On Cable TV, August 2022) Ho, boy. Wow. Even in the land of obscure films, Huo xing ren takes a prize of sorts, as this 1976 Thai Science Fiction/kaiju film barely has 65 IMDB votes as of August 2022. Even better—I’ll call by its French title Les hommes d’un autre planète [Men from another planet], as the film was apparently never translated into English… or if it was, not even IMDB knows about it. There are, mind you, reasons for this obscurity. If you’re seeing the film without context, you’ll realize early on that it’s not very good. Cinematographically dubious, it has a terribly stupid plot, worse characters and laughable production values. The French dub is a kitsch masterpiece with un-synched audio, unconvincing voice actors and the incongruous use of an instrumental version of the 1960s French novelty pop song “Monsieur Cannibale.” Approaching this film cold is probably the best way to go, as we zip from kids playing in a Thai temple to them discovering a statue of a mythical defending god to aliens landing on earth to low-rent kaiju insanity as a monster stops on shoddy “street” high-rises, to a triple-threat fight sequence on the moon involving a Thai god, an alien invader and an American robot. If this sounds interesting, I may have done too good a job in describing an awful film. On the other hand, well, “Thai kaiju” is really all I, or you, will need in order to decide if you want to see this. Need any more proof of the film’s obscurity? Well, it has only two user reviews on IMDB, and you’re going to be sorely disappointed if you try following the links to external reviews, many of whom are broken. Fortunately, and again as of this writing, the single best source of information about the film’s wild patchwork Japan/Taiwan/Hong Kong/Thailand production history is on Roberto Zanni’s Italian-language blog—it’s well worth translating to get a gist of it. I’m not often a big fan of those “so bad it’s good” movies—life’s too short to convince yourself that you’re enjoying something terrible—but I’ll have to admit that there’s a hypnotically engrossing quality to director Hung-Min Chen’s Les hommes d’une autre planète: How much crazier is this thing going to be? What is going on? Is there a limit to how cheaply is it going to be executed? The only way to know if you’re going to get an answer to those questions is to keep watching, and marvel once more at the idea that there was such a thing as a Thai kaiju film.