| Matango is a simply
wondrous film. Ishiro
Honda made many fine and criminally underrated
works in his long career as director at Toho,
but Matango could honestly be his finest
film of all. Better than Godzilla
(1954)? I don’t know; the two films
are rather different and difficult to compare:
one’s a large-scale anti-war monster
epic while the other is a small-scale psychological
drama that only veers into genre territory
in its final reel or two. The films, at the
same time, aren’t too different either.
Godzilla simply shows us the effects or human
greed and callousness on a large scale, whereas
Matango presents it on a smaller, more
personal scale. Honda definitely agreed that
he had made a fine film; he would frequently
name Matango when asked to name his
all-time favorite of any of his movies. Matango
is a hauntingly beautiful and highly underrated
little drama that succeeds on every level.
In a padded cell in Tokyo’s
psychiatric ward, a man sits in the dark.
This man is Kenji Murai (Akira Kubo), a former
college professor. Months ago, he was with
several other vacationers: Kasai (Yoshio Tsuchiya),
a wealthy but insecure businessman, Mami (Kumi
Mizuno), a promiscuous starlet, virginal
college student Akiko (Miki Yashiro), narcissistic
novelist Yoshida (Hiroshi Tachikawa), frustrated
skipper Sakuda (Hiroshi Koizumi) and sailor
Koyama. They had gone sailing the Pacific
in a yacht for a few days to leave the stress
of their hectic Tokyo lifestyles behind. That
night, however, the yacht is caught in a storm
and the mast is destroyed, leaving the ship
drifting in the Pacific. The group soon reaches
a small island and goes ashore. Making their
home in the crusty, fungus covered hulk of
an abandoned former research vessel, they
find that food is scarce and that the only
readily available sustenance is a large mushroom
that grows in the nearby forest. The log of
the ship’s former crew, however, who
are all missing, warns that mushrooms could
be dangerous. There is also the problem of
some mysterious, creepy figures that seem
to lurking in parts of the island. The castaways,
suffering from hunger, fear and paranoia,
begin to viciously turn on each other. One
by one, they all succumb and go into the forest,
eating the forbidden fungi. The consequences
prove to be too grotesque to imagine.
Matango has a plot reminiscent
of both William Golding’s Lord of
the Flies and Jean-Paul Sartre’s
No Exit. Like Lord of the Flies, it
shows how the laws that keep human society
together can quickly disintegrate under desperate
enough circumstances. Honda and screenwriter
Takeshi Kimura, like Sartre, however, understand
that the ego-driven responses of human beings
are most often far worse than that the circumstances
that trigger them. Matango, like such
earlier films as Half
Human (1955), H-Man
(1958) and The
Human Vapour (1960), is a deeper,
more personal and more horror-oriented film
than Honda’s kaiju or space epics. There
are no expensive sequences of miniature city
demolition; the majority of the film takes
place within the confines of an unnamed and
seemingly uncharted desert island. In most
of Ishiro Honda’s films, Eiji
Tsuburaya’s special effects work
always takes precedence over the “people”
scenes he would shoot. Here, in a rare but
welcome instance, like in The
Human Vapour (1960), Tsuburaya’s
FX plays second fiddle to the story, characters
and actors.
Tsuburaya’s work, however,
is no doubt about it some of his very best
here. Rear production, suitmation, pioneering
photographic techniques, miniature ships,
matte paintings and grotesque monster makeup
are all employed here to nearly flawless use.
It simply seems far less showy than usual
thanks to the smaller scale and nearly invisible
integration with Honda’s stellar actor
sequences. Also quite notable is Matango's
look. The film is surely one of Honda's most
visually rich and cinematically lovely works,
boasting lush, atmospheric and gorgeous cinematography
by Honda's veteran DP Hajime Koizumi and excellent
production design by Juichi Ikuno with the
abandoned ship's interior in particular being
extremely visually unsettling and far more
stimulating to look at than the average tokusatsu
film set, on par with the art direction in
any Mario Bava movie or Hammer horror film
in terms of atmosphere. It’s lyrical,
psychedelic, beautiful, fantastical and foreboding
all at the same time, like a lush, Impressionist-era
painting melded with the lurid cover of a
pulp novel. The music by Sadao Bekku, while
not as iconic as that of Akira
Ifukube, of course, is moody, dream-like
and perfectly complements the film’s
imagery. Matango is not unlike Hajime
Sato’s later Shochiku production Goke,
Body Snatcher from Hell, in plot and
feel. That film features another group of
travelers behaving badly (this time with a
plane crash rather than shipwreck) but with
a race of alien blobs that possess human bodies
and turn them into zombie-like vampires through
a vaginal vertical gash on the forehead picking
them off rather than mushrooms. Matango,
however, is a much more cohesive film than
the occasionally sloppy Goke.
Matango is a rare Ishiro
Honda film that truly belongs to Ishiro
Honda. The performances by all are mesmerizing.
Particularly getting a chance to shine are
Kumi
Mizuno as the prissy and whorish Mami
and Akira
Kurosawa veteran Yoshio Tsuchiya as the
deeply tormented Kasai, who starts off as
a rich and cocky executive and becomes a pathetic
wraith whose money gets him absolutely nowhere.
Hiroshi Koizumi, usually playing egg-head
scientists in most of Honda’s films,
also does well in the role of Sakuda, the
yachts skipper who is deeply disgusted by
the self behavior of his passengers; the role
being something of a departure from his previous
ones. Matango is certainly writer Takeshi
Kimura’s most notable script. Kimura,
who wrote such works as The
Human Vapour (1960) prior and The
War of the Gargantuas (1966) after
was Toho’s more downbeat genre film
scribe. Shinichi Sekizawa would frequently
pen the less socially conscious and more escapist
fare. The Sekizawa scripted films depict mankind
in a more positive light, frequently showing
mankind uniting in the face of an alien or
monster threat. Kimura, a member of the Japanese
Communist Party, had a very different approach.
His works were deeper characters studies and
far more inquisitive of human nature. Matango
is hardly flamboyantly nihilistic, but it
definitely questions human’s behavior,
in the end criticizing the insanity of day-to-day
human life as being no better than that on
the island, just on a larger, more unconscious
scale. The script’s character development
is impeccable, probably the finest in any
Toho produced genre film. If one watches closely
on a subsequent viewing, you can notice that
the negative character traits the cast exhibits
are already slightly evident even in the opening
when they are all “happy”. However,
the more stressed out, paranoid, famished
and pushed to the edge they are, the more
their negative “id” personas become
who they really are.
Sadly, the film’s reputation
is only just start to mend. Bypassing a theatrical
release in the US, it was released directly
to television by American International Pictures
under the hyperbolic (and very AIP) howler
of a title: Attack of the Mushroom People.
Now don’t get me wrong, I love the schlocky
AIP-produced B-movies like Attack of the
Giant Leeches that the title was meant
to invoke as much as the next guy, but Matango
is at a much higher level than a simple B-movie.
The film, for decades, was only available
in the West in battered, horrendously dubbed
16mm prints with a panned-and-scanned image
that was so faded that everything was in varying
shades of pink. It’s an experience not
unlike watching a film chewed up and spit
out. The film was thus often dismissed as
high camp, a real crying shame indeed. Thankfully,
with the film now available in the States
in its original dialogue and aspect ratio,
Matango’s reputation is improving.
Overall, Matango is a triumph, far
from a campy monster movie and a seminal work
in Honda’s oeuvre.
|
(5/5)