Having seen this in Japanese on the big screen back in the early eighties and later on TV, I can say that it's pretty strange no matter what the US dub did to it. The best I can say however is the film is very entertaining in a bad movie way.
The audience I saw it with at the Japan Society here in New York City laughed at a lot of the film and this included a number of Japanese. The strangeness of the film starts with the weird inclusion of Nostradamus as a way to explain the social commentary the film makers were clearly trying to get across. Why it didn't occur to them that Nostradamus would just turn the whole shebang into a big fantasy farce is only clear when you see the bizarreness that follows.
Entire traffic jams blowing up from one car crash. New Guinea wildlife mutants. Motor cycle gangs gone suicidal and driving off cliffs. Japanese mobs rioting for rice. Scientific / paranormal explanations going hand in hand. A final apocalypse sequence that lasts for 15 minutes but is entirely made up as if the movie has become a documentary. The acting is very over the top sometimes and other times it's very, very restrained. There's a few "Speed Racer" type reaction shots that don't play well on live humans here in the US.
There's a lot of SFX footage pulled from other Toho productions, The Submersion of Japan (Tidal Wave) and The Last War (1961!) being the obvious ones. However, the movie is so visually disjointed by the end that it doesn't really make a difference. It's interesting to compare this to other Japanese fantasy films of the same era that toss modern-day Japan into chaos. It seems that the consensus was the Japanese would loose their self-control and become a violent mob.
The music is good in an unusual way and the pacing of the film is enough to keep you watching even though it's sheer idiocy (for a good cause, though).
The audience I saw it with at the Japan Society here in New York City laughed at a lot of the film and this included a number of Japanese. The strangeness of the film starts with the weird inclusion of Nostradamus as a way to explain the social commentary the film makers were clearly trying to get across. Why it didn't occur to them that Nostradamus would just turn the whole shebang into a big fantasy farce is only clear when you see the bizarreness that follows.
Entire traffic jams blowing up from one car crash. New Guinea wildlife mutants. Motor cycle gangs gone suicidal and driving off cliffs. Japanese mobs rioting for rice. Scientific / paranormal explanations going hand in hand. A final apocalypse sequence that lasts for 15 minutes but is entirely made up as if the movie has become a documentary. The acting is very over the top sometimes and other times it's very, very restrained. There's a few "Speed Racer" type reaction shots that don't play well on live humans here in the US.
There's a lot of SFX footage pulled from other Toho productions, The Submersion of Japan (Tidal Wave) and The Last War (1961!) being the obvious ones. However, the movie is so visually disjointed by the end that it doesn't really make a difference. It's interesting to compare this to other Japanese fantasy films of the same era that toss modern-day Japan into chaos. It seems that the consensus was the Japanese would loose their self-control and become a violent mob.
The music is good in an unusual way and the pacing of the film is enough to keep you watching even though it's sheer idiocy (for a good cause, though).