April 17: Did You Get It? — A bug movie.

The Drifting Classroom is based on a horror manga series written and illustrated by Kazuo Umezu, who also had his work turned into the movies The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch and Tamami: The Baby’s Curse and the TV series Umezu Kazuo: Kyôfu gekijô. The series was originally serialized in Weekly Shōnen Sunday from 1972 to 1974 and is about a school building that has been mysteriously transported through time to a post-apocalyptic future.

Directed by Nobuhiko Ôbayashi (who not only directed House, he was also the man who made the Charles Bronson Mandom commericial) with a cast of untrained actors who were actual students at the Kobe International School, this film takes the sprawling story of the manga and tries to turn it into a condensed film. It avoids one of the major points of the original story as the adults almost all go mad and literally go to war with the young children who have to fight back.

I also have no idea why they shot this in English with Japanese subtitles instead of just making it in the native language. It isn’t like there was a huge crowd in the U.S. dying to see an adaption of a manga made two decades before outside of some hardcores. Maybe they thought that Troy Donahue was still a big deal?

As if it were bad enough that Sho and the other students have traveled through a time slip, this end of the world situation also has monstrous cockroaches that go wild and attack the school, killing many of the children. Yes, a movie that holds back nothing while also having song and dance numbers every few moments. As you can imagine, I’m fascinated by this film.

There’s also a friendly little alien that feels badly that the children have no water to wash their faces, so he urinates in their faces. Where else are you going to see that? Or a child ride a tricycle into the next reality? I’m not saying this is great, but it’s weird and sometimes that’s better than great.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.