Frankenstein Conquers the World

A German laboratory holds the still-living heart of Frankenstein's monster. As the Second World War ends, the organ is taken to Japan rather than let the Allies capture it, and kept in a Hiroshima research facility. When the city is destroyed by an atomic bomb, the heart appears to be lost with it. Some years later, a feral boy is found wandering the streets and hills around Hiroshima. He survives on animals, shows no harm from the radiation, and grows at an unnatural rate, which draws the attention of the American scientist Dr. James Bowen and his Japanese colleagues. As the boy's body swells toward gigantic size, another threat surfaces from beneath the earth: Baragon, a burrowing creature that begins attacking the Japanese countryside, leaving the scientists caught between studying a being they cannot control and stopping a monster they cannot contain.

The film is a Toho production directed by Ishirō Honda, made between Invasion of Astro-Monster and The War of the Gargantuas, and the eighteenth of the twenty-five features he directed. Takeshi Kimura wrote the screenplay, and Tadao Takashima, Nick Adams, Kumi Mizuno, Yoshio Tsuchiya and Koji Furuhata appear among a cast of thirty-seven credited players. A Japanese-American co-production, it runs ninety minutes and mixes horror with science fiction.

On IMDb the film holds 5.5 out of 10 from roughly 2,700 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 6.7 from a much smaller group of 78. The wide gap reflects how differently a dedicated audience and a broad one receive it, with the former rating it considerably higher.