"I've never seen the sky this color before. It's just like flying through a sea of blood."

I watched something on the TV Tuesday night and the words really resonated with me.

"The world's in terrible shape. Trouble between nations grows worse with terrorism breaking out all over the place. Everything's gone crazy!"

     

No, it wasn't the State of the Union, but it was every bit as fucked up.

This week's Thursday Thriller is Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell.

Remember how last week I said the Japanese were making the hell out of samurai and giant monster movies in the 1960s? This 1968 Hajime Sato film is neither of those.

It starts on an airliner whose passengers include a corrupt politician, an arms dealer and his wife, a psychologist, and a blonde lady who speaks only English but somehow understands everyone else's Japanese perfectly well. Her husband was killed in Vietnam.

The news of the day is that the British ambassador was assassinated. While the politician and arms dealer discuss the sad, but profitable, state of the world, birds start smashing into the windows.

Then the flight crew receives word there's a bomb on the plane. In searching for the bomb, they notice a passenger in a turtleneck sweater, white suit, and wraparound sunglasses.

He doesn't have the bomb, just a sniper rifle. He's the assassin.

Then a flying saucer forces the plane to crash.

While the pilot and surviving passengers argue about the best strategy to assure their survival, the assassin takes a stewardess hostage and escapes. Wandering in the wilderness, they find the flying saucer, and the assassin is compelled to step into its light.

And here's the best part: his forehead splits open, a blob of silver slime crawls into the wound, and he becomes a vampire.

The second best part comes a little later when the aliens use the arms dealer's wife as a loudspeaker to announce their plans of Earth's destruction, then throw her mannequin stunt double over a cliff.

The humans are powerless to stop the alien menace due to their constant bickering and in-fighting. It's a statement about war or something.

A crazy story loaded up with trippy special effects, Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell is the weirdest movie I've reviewed in a week. It streams on YouTube.