Matango

Purely because not all their contemporary monster movies could feature big mutated lizards (Godzilla), flying turtles (Gamera) or humongous moths (Mothra), the Japanese also made a monster movie with giant … mushrooms! Well, I say "the Japanese" but basically it's once again just the one and only legendary director Ishirô Honda who was responsible for yet another imaginative and extremely entertaining cult classic. Honda was an amazingly talented director and he single-handedly directed Japan's finest genre milestones. So… mushrooms! Yes I know this sounds incredibly idiotic and the international title "Attack of the Mushroom People" also strengthens the suspicion that we're dealing with a silly and light-headed B-movie, but this honestly is a very competent and admirably atmospheric tale of terror! Seven prominent citizens, including a university professor, a writer and a famous pop singer, turn their back on the stress of Tokyo for a holiday on a luxurious sailing yacht. There's a lot of flirting, laughing and "La La La La" singing on board, but then a massive thunderstorm turns their yacht into a heavily damaged piece of driftwood and the group washes ashore a mysterious fog-enshrouded island. With a food supply of barely one week, the group rapidly falls apart due to intrigues and selfishness, and what's the deal with those ominous mushrooms that grow all around the island? They also stumble upon a large and stranded research vessel that is overgrown with fungus and the same damn mushrooms! The survivors instinctively know they shouldn't eat them, but what else are they supposed to do when there's no more food? I consider myself very lucky and privileged because I was able to see the original Japanese-language version of "Matango" on a big cinema screen, during a little festival in my country with a focus on botanical- themed horror movies. Granted, the picture quality was quite creaky and the film was interrupted every 10 minutes due to technical reasons, but the charm and nostalgia value of an early '60s film on the big screen is irreplaceable! The concept of the film is one of the most original in horror cinema history, and director Honda maintains an unsettling atmosphere throughout. He achieves this thanks to subtle camera work, eerie sound effects & music, embittered character drawings and frightening monster designs and set pieces. Yes, the mushroom-monsters definitely DO look creepy and the large vessel is truly nightmarish!

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.

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.

When I first saw this film on a local late-night horror movie show, it was the late 1960s and our family hadn't yet purchased a color TV. Growing up with films and TV shows produced and viewed in B&W made me sensitive to the unique qualities of this medium, particularly the way in which it focuses the viewer's attention on the quality and play of light. It is this element of "Matango" which most impressed me—the cold ethereal light of the fog-shrouded forest covered in great lumps of pallid fungus sent a real shiver down my back. Although I had cut my teeth on such midnight horror movies, this one actually stole away my sleep for a couple nights!

Over time I had lost track of this film. The Saturday Night horror show became a thing of the past and no one seemed interested in rebroadcasting these old films. Then very recently, on a lark, I asked our local (independent) video rental place if they had this film in their data base, and Lo! there it was, available on VHS. They ordered it, held it for me, I rented it and prepared to sit down and be scared by it again after a hiatus of over 25 years.

Imagine my surprise to find that the film is in color! In color, it didn't have the same impact at all as it did when I watched it on our B&W TV back home. Quickly, before it got too deep into the story, I changed all the settings on my TV to a nicely balanced black and white, and WOW! There it was, the scariness, the moodiness, the mystery, and the visual subtleties which make it a very nice piece of art.

Really, folks—you gotta see this film in black and white to really appreciate how well it was photographed, lighted, constructed and dressed. This is quite a gem of a film, but one which should have been in black and white to begin with.

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.