Shochiku's attempt at the kaiju genre is mostly forgettable. The first half of the film isn't half bad, a kind of mod space adventure. The best scene in the film has the group of astronaut protagonists bouncing around the moon to a little samba. On their trip to Mars, a UFO attaches an egg to their ship. They bring it back to Earth to study. Soon Girara (aka Guilala) spawns, a scaly chicken monster with bouncy antennae that seeks out and destroys energy sources. The monster portion of the film is very typical and, with a rather uninteresting monster (tellingly, no sequels were made, though Girara was resurrected for a 2008 kaiju flick), pretty dull. The samba-rific score of the first half of the film makes way for the two notes that denote Girara's rampage. Eiji Okada, the star of Hiroshima mon amour, appears in a small role. There are actually a lot of white stars in this movie, most notably Peggy Neal (who also starred in The Terror Beneath the Sea the year before). The Japanese gal, Itoko Harada, is pretty cute, too.
Review of The X from Outer Space
