review for Invasion of the Neptune Men on AllMovie

This reviewer first saw Invasion of the Neptune Men in its New York television premiere, during 1963, at the age of seven (after looking forward to it for a week, based on the ads that ran on the local station). On watching it, I discovered that it was Japanese (a fact hidden by the trailer that had been shown) and that it was incredibly boring; indeed, most of the action scenes and the good spaceship footage had been used in the minute-long trailer, and they were re-used many times throughout the movie. To a lot of viewers, Invasion of the Neptune Men was the kind of movie that gave Japanese science fiction films a bad name. The low-quality special effects, the non-existent acting, the bad dubbing, and the chaotic plotting and pacing were all of a piece with what critics had been saying, erroneously, about the Godzilla movies for years. That said, the movie has sort of grown on this reviewer over the years, its cheesy special effects and ridiculous dialogue taking on a sort of so-bad-they're-good charm. In more recent years, Shinichi Chiba, who played Space Chief, has emerged as an international leading man in martial arts movies under the name Sonny Chiba. This movie -- his debut in a starring role -- has received the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment, and memorably so (one of the robots, watching the seemingly endless repetitive aerial dogfights between spaceships, remarks that "Independence Day now seems like such a finely nuanced movie"). The whole picture is a thoroughly memorable (if not necessarily enjoyable, outside of the MST3K continuum) specimen of bad cinema. Perhaps understandably, director Koji Ota was never allowed to make another feature film.