“Can we be certain the race is extinct?”
Dr. John Rayburn (John Carradine) discusses with Professor Philip Osborne (Russell Thorson) and Professor Alan Templeton (Robert Karnes) a major scientific find from the Japanese Alps. In flashback Dr. Rayburn relates the story of what was found.
Five friends are on a ski vacation in the Japanese Alps. Two of them decide to ski to the cabin of a friend. The other three ski down to the inn. The inn keeper tells the three that a storm is coming. The innkeeper and the three friends at the inn try to phone the remote cabin but continue to get no answer. Finally, outside they hear the rumble of an avalanche. Then the phone rings. Instead of the voices of their friends the sounds coming over the phone are screams.
The next day, after the storm, a rescue party heads up to the cabin. They find two of the inhabitants dead. The third is missing. All they find are tufts of hair and some giant footprints outside in the snow. The bodies of the two dead people are taken down the mountain. The third person is never found.
In the spring an anthropologist, Professor Tanaka (in the US version) leads a small expedition team into the mountains looking for, what he refers to as, “The Snowman”. One night, in camp, the snowman appears. One boy followed the Snowman. He fell down a ravine and was rescued by a young woman. She belonged to a primitive mountain tribe. The leader of the tribe is furious that the woman brought the boy into the village. He fears their god will be angry. He makes her give a food offering to their god the snowman, which lives in a cave near-by. While she is gone the villagers take the boy, tie him up, and hang him from a cliff. The snowman finds the boy and releases him.
A circus group poaching in the area finds the snowman’s son. They tie him up. When the father comes to rescue the son, they capture him and put him in a cage on a truck. The boy snowman escapes and follows the truck. He tries to free his father from the truck and is shot. The snowman goes crazy and kills all the circus people. He takes his dead son back to his cave. Insane with hate and vengeance, the formally mild snowman kills the villagers and anyone else he can get his hands on.
“Half Human” was released in 1958 in the US. The Japanese version was directed by Ishiro Honda. The US sequences were directed by Kenneth G. Crane. Technical effects were done by Eiji Tsuburaya. The American version isn’t dubbed, it’s narrated by John Carradine. American film companies did with “Half Human” the same thing they did with “Varan the Unbelievable” 1962 and “Godzilla King of the Monsters” 1956. They played cut and paste. The American company “Distributors Corporation of America” added some scenes and narration and took out a lot of Japanese scenes. The American version of the film contains original Japanese footage but with no talking. All talking is done by Carradine as part of the ‘flashback’ narrative. Interspersed are scenes of John Carradine in discussion with the other American actors. Basically, what they did is mess up a perfectly good movie.
There are some obvious plot holes in the American version. If the snowman was so docile, why did he kill the two guys in the remote cabin and what happened to the third guy? Also, where did the circus guys come from? These are questions you do not ask when it comes to the original Japanese movie. All of the explanations ended up on the cutting room floor.
I’ve seen some really good TOHO movies recently. This is not one of them. Nor is it a good example of what director Honda can do. I don’t recommend the American version unless you collect all things TOHO and/or Ishiro Honda.
The movie remains controversial due to its depiction of the natives in the film. This group is seen as a stand in for the Burakumin, an outcast group on the bottom of the social order. They have suffered harshly from discrimination and ostracism in Japan. The film showed them as having deformities due to inbreeding and violent behavior. Due to TOHO’s self-imposed ban, a home video copy of the original Japanese version has never been released. The only distribution available is for the American version.
The body of the young snowman in the morgue was the same costume used in the original movie. TOHO sent it to the US to include in the US scenes. This is not the first time that TOHO sent up their props for a movie. We thank them by mucking up their movie and losing their props.