Alien spores hitch a ride on an unmanned space probe and go to Earth. The parasitic life forms crash land on an island and cause a squid, a crab, and a snapping turtle to grow to giant size. Director Ishiro Honda, working from a compelling script by Ei Ogawa, relates the engrossing story at a brisk pace, makes fine use of the exotic tropical setting, maintains a serious tone throughout, and stages a fierce climactic beast bash between the crab and the turtle with rip-roaring aplomb. The sound acting from the capable cast rates as another substantial asset, with especially commendable contributions from Akiro Kubo as likable photographer Taro Kudo, the adorable Atsuko Takahashi as the perky Ayako Hoshino, Kenji Sahara as cynical opportunist Makoto Obata, and Noritake Saito as traumatized native Rico. Moreover, the filmmakers warrant further praise for playing the wild premise completely straight, with no silly humor or an annoying subplot involving a cutesy kid. The special effects are quite colorful and impressive. Taiichi Kankura's sumptuous widescreen cinematography gives the picture an attractive vibrant look. Veteran composer Akiro Ifekube comes through with a typically robust and rousing full-bore orchestral score. A nifty creature feature.

My fellow Trekkers who rent Ishiro Honda's 1970 offering, "Space Amoeba," expecting to see an 11,000-mile-long, single-celled organism on the order of the one shown in the classic "Immunity Syndrome" episode may be a bit disappointed here. Rather, the sparkling hive colony in this film that attaches itself to Earth's unmanned Helios 7 rocket, en route to Jupiter, is comparatively teeny, but still capable of causing major-league mishegas nonetheless. This space hive causes the Earth rocket to crashland in the Pacific and proceeds to transform a squid, a crab and a turtle into some giant monsters, respectively Gezora, Ganime and Kamoeba. Good thing that a Japanese biologist, a photographer, an industrial spy AND the obligatory pretty girl all happen to be convening on nearby Selgio Island to explore a future resort area.... Anyway, this Honda monster bash is a mixed blessing at best. While Gezora looks pretty cool lumbering about on his tentacles, his fellow monstrosities are fairly lame, and the seemingly inevitable dukeout between two of them may be the dullest in the history of the kaiju eiga. The film grows increasingly loopy as it proceeds, and the final 1/3, conflating bats, a native marriage ceremony and a deus-ex-machina volcano, is quite bizarre. Fortunately, the photography of the island looks great, longtime Honda collaborator Akira Ifukube provides another rousing score, and FX man Sadamasa Arikawa dishes out some interesting visuals, especially his outer space shots and the "amoeba" itself. (Sadly, his giant monsters are not equal to those of an earlier Honda colleague, Eiji Tsuburaya.) All in all, the film is an undeniably fun mixed bag that should just manage to please fans of the genre. Oh...a great-looking DVD here, thanks to the fine folks at Media Blasters' Tokyo Shock unit.

In the late sixties and going into the seventies Toho loved monster movies based on islands. Well, this time it really works. The story is cool, the acting is great and the three main monsters are major league cool. Their names are hard to pronounce but I do feel that the designs are cool and they are not the standard monsters that you find in these movies, a cuddle fish, a crab and a snapping turtle. I love the effect that allows the Snapping Turltle to shoot out his neck. Okay, now the downside, the old native thinking that Gezora is some kind of God even though there is no monsters like that in their religion is just stupid. But that's just me. So to make a long story short, I give it 9 big stars!

"Yog: Monster from Space" (the English title) is sort of like "Plan Nine from Outer Space" in the respect that it is a pretty bad film that is wonderfully entertaining to watch. One great example is found in the beginning. The main character is sitting in a jet reading a newspaper. We can see the headline -- 'Jupiter probe fails' (or something to that effect). At that >exact< moment, the guy looks out the window and happens to see the Jupiter probe parachuting back to earth (and he's in a jet going 200-300 miles per hour). Later, at his destination, he's assigned a photography job on this tropical island (apparently a Japanese tourist company is going to build a resort there). When he sees the location of this island marked with an "x" on the map, he says "gee, thats the EXACT SPOT where I saw the jupiter probe go down". Then there are the rubbery-looking monsters complete with Godzillaesque screeching noises, really bad special effects shots where people look like action figures, big halos around the tentacles that grab people, etc. Essentially, the movie is pretty much the same Godzilla formula: characters discover monster(s), characters meet incompetent tribal villagers, characters try to defeat monster(s). For anyone who likes Godzilla et al., or anyone who wants to laugh hysterically at rubbery stop motion monsters in a bad film, this is a must-see.