There are people who have seen a human melt.
Ishiro Honda must have been obsessed with the dangers of the atom bomb because in 1958, a mere four years after he brought Godzilla to the screen, Honda directed The H-Man, in which exposure to nuclear fallout causes men to liquefy and (like The Blob, which came out the same year) dissolve anyone they come into contact with. (It's kind of like getting slimed on You Can't Do That on Television, only with more lethal results.)
The early part of the film plays like a police procedural with the cops trying to shut down a heroin-smuggling operation. This leads them to cabaret singer Yumi Shirakawa, whose boyfriend disappeared into thin air (or should that be thin water?) one night, which baffles both the cops and his own gang. Kenji Sahara plays the university biology professor whose theories about the case go unheeded by his friend, inspector Akihiko Hirata, until they witness the creature in action during a police raid. The highlight of the film, though, is probably the sequence where a couple of sailors relate what happened when they investigated a seemingly abandoned tuna boat. Honda uses dark spaces to build suspense and incorporates some eerie visuals to depict the liquid man attacks, which are more convincing than the reversed-film effects that come later.
Like most of the movies I get from Jeff, The H-Man isn't available on DVD domestically, which is a shame because it really is a neat little film. There's a lot more to Ishiro Honda's oeuvre than the giant monster movies he's best known for, but you wouldn't know that from Netflix. Maybe someday I'll get to see his 1960 film The Human Vapor, which is about a librarian who is subject to a scientific experiment gone wrong and takes to a life of crime. Something tells me The Human Vapor and The H-Man would have had a lot to talk about.