Matango

I have noticed that many of the commentators in this forum have stated that this film gave them nightmares. No wonder. This film based on William Hope Hodgson's novel "The Voice in the Night", has a plot that is so bizarre that it could only have been inspired by someone's nightmares. The premise of intelligent fungus luring people to eat them and then the people slowly turn to "mushroom people" is so nightmarishly creepy that I can't imagine that Hodgson (or anyone else) could of dreamed this idea up when he was wide awake.

MATANGO (aka ATTACK OF THE MUSHROOM PEOPLE) is a surprisingly low key atmospheric Japanese horror fantasy. The film is a bit slowly paced at times and too much time is spent on the castaways bickering amongst themselves. There are some elements that I suspect were better developed in the novel. One scene has the two female castaways hearing the voices of dead relatives trying to lure them into the rainforest. This never occurs again and leads nowhere. I'm sure the stuff about nuclear experiments was not in Hodgson's novel. However, the art direction is excellent, the music creepy and the final sequence memorable. Overall, the boys at Toho did a good job.

I don't care what the Medvids think of this film, or the pseudo hip MST3K crowd thinks either, your old pal jim says, see this one.

Toho are mostly known for their dark bleak period pieces and their goofy monster flicks, but every once in a while they delved into something else and Matango is a great example of this.

Well ahead of its time it tells the story of ship wreck survivors trying to make it until help comes, but they don't appear to be alone on the island and tensions are beginning to build.

So okay I admit the concept is daft, the antagonists are a bit silly but lets be honest they aren't a million miles from those in The Last of Us (2013). Despite this they actually do the job quite well and look considerably better than you'd imagine considering this was the early 60's.

The film is a real slow burner and very little of it features the antagonists at all, the majority is the turmoil between survivors but it does this to a passable degree.

Though not everything it could have been there is a lot to be impressed over in Matango and it's a neat little forgotten Toho movie that deserves attention.

The Good:

Looks excellent for its time

Some good ideas

The Bad:

Cast and characters are pretty forgettable

Very slow burn

Things I Learnt From This Movie:

An opportune time to tell a woman you love her for the first time is straight after hitting her

Could easily have had a sequel about killer cheese people

If you look around on the Internet you can see that almost all the entries for this movie, are above average and there are probably a million different reasons for that. I think they all have in common that somehow this movie really gets people on a sub-conscious level and represents something.

I remember seeing this movie at various times growing up on the late night horror shows, in Houston, Texas, called "Weird" and "Late Wierd", and then in California on "Creature Features".

There is something about watching this movie about a groups of somewhat related friends who are out on a cruise in their rich friends sailboat, well, actually the exact details escape me, and I am not sure that the English tranlation accurately tells what was supposed to be going on in the original story.

The boat is caught in a storm, and they drift through heavy fog to a deserted island where everything is misty, moist, and fungus ridden. To survive they look for food, and find that people have been to the island before, in fact a large group of people on a freighter ship that has wasted away.

There are some clues on the ship as to what happened, and some strange goings on that stress these "friends" to the breaking point, and their cohesion starts to unravel.

There is just something special about this eerie and fun movie that if I ever see it in DVD format I will pick it up.

The cast of this film all consider it one of their proudest achievements. This film is about false friendships, utter hatred, and abandonment of values. Constructed from William Hope Hodgson's rather simple horror story, in which a man hailing a schooner for food tells how the virtuous (abstinent) unmarried couple (himself and his fiancee) were in a shipwreck and tried to make their home on an island encrusted with fungus, first in a ship and then in two tents on an unidentified sandy substance, only to eat the fungus and become it, takes on a whole new dimension by placing the man, here a psychology professor, and his student fiancee with a rich couple together only for the money, a serious writer, and the two-man crew. Though they never abandon the fungus-encrusted ship for tents, they soon become embittered over food, and the men all want the virgin, not the rich showgirl. Hodgson was on the way to becoming a minister before he was killed in WWI, and his story is explicitly Christian. This film takes out explicit religion (though the Japanese version has a brief scene related to Akiko's Shinto beliefs, which was deleted because most Americans wouldn't understand it), but retains the morals. The psychologist is unable to cope with the degrading values, particularly after the mate is shot over money (useless) and turtle eggs (food). The skipper takes the ship (which isn't his, Kasai wearing a captain's uniform to prove it (and how stuck up he is)) after repairing it, without anyone else, but he dies at sea, Murai soon finding the abandoned ship. The voyage reveals the true character of the relationships with one another, and their attempts to break down the virtuous couple, which ends with the psychologist in the asylum, where he tells his story. He gets succumbed, too. "My friends are alive; I'm the one who died," he tells them. The crew dead, his friends are left on the island, slowly merging with the fungus...

MATANGO, directed by Ishiro Honda, is an exceptionally beautiful fantasy film from the mighty Toho. Bastardized for its American release, badly dubbed, retitled ("Attack of the Mushroom People") and afforded very little respect, its recent re-emergence as a special edition DVD confirms its place in the realm of fantastique cinema.

What makes this amazing film so effective is its seductively spare but intelligent screenplay, nightmarish atmosphere, serenely creepy score and stunning special effects. Tonally, it recalls underrated Japanese genre flicks such as "The Mistress in a Cave", "Horror of Malformed Men" and the delightful "Living Skeleton". Like the mushrooms the shipwrecked survivors of a pleasure craft are drawn to, it seduces us with its simple structure, pleasing taste and rich subtext.

The film operates on a number of thematic levels, but Honda's achievement is that he never allows the dense thematics to weigh the very human drama down. Like all classic stories of survival, human greed, envy, love and hunger are the engines of the conflict. The search for a state of being free of responsibility and consequences is the dream driving the conflicted.

It is of curious interest to me that the characters in this "uncharted island" fantasy include a Skipper, a Millionaire, a Professor, a First Mate and a Girl Next Door. Produced before "Gilligan's Island" debuted on American TV, it could surely be argued that this orchestration of characters was a template for Sherwood Schwartz, the creator of "Gilligan's Island".

A palpable sadness permeates the last twenty minutes of MATANGO, a sense of blinding melancholy that elevates it to a dizzying level of achievement.

MATANGO explores how we are all drawn to pleasures that we know may sign our death warrants while daring to suggest that death by pleasure is a demise more preferable to death without love.

Stunning.