| Released in the USA under the
ridiculous title Attack of the Mushroom People
and for years only seen on TV in 16mm prints,
Matango is actually a highly underrated,
quite hauntingly beautiful and genuinely eerie
little film, a superb drama and character study
that only descends into the genre realm in the
final two reels.
A group of happy-go-lucky Japanese
vacationers get caught in a storm one night and
a marooned at sea. They soon arrive at the shores
of a tropical island. After taking up residence
in a rotting, fungus filled hulk of an abandoned
ship, they soon find that food is quite scarce
and that the only available source of food is
a strange variety of mushroom. The castaways begin
to turn on each and one by one, begin to succumb
to the island’s hallucinogenic mushrooms
with grotesque consequences.
When viewed in its full Tohoscope
glory, Matango is a wonder to behold.
Ishiro Honda's direction is superb and the
film really has a highly suspenseful feel but
with kind of lyrical beauty to it as well. Visually,
the film is also probably Honda's prettiest film,
boasting lush, gorgeous Eastman color cinematography
courtesy of resident kaiju eiga DP Hajime Koizumi,
amazing production design and Eiji
Tsuburaya's most subtle (yet best as well)
special effects work, with rear projection, miniature
ships, matte paintings and genuinely creepy monster
makeup all employed to nearly flawless use, with
no model cities to be found. The Matango themselves
are some of the creepiest monsters to be designed
by the Toho special effects team, with some of
their deformities even somewhat resembling radiation
burns. The music by Sadao Bekku is extremely different
and almost a nice getaway from Akira
Ifukube's, as Stuart Galbraith would put them,
“grand but heavy” themes. Bekku's
themes give the film a nicely creepy vibe
The performances Honda is able
to get out of his actors are some of the finest
in any such genre film. In most of Honda's films,
such as the second movie he made in 1963:
Atragon,
the actors all play second fiddle to the special
effects sequences. In Matango, however,
the actors really take center stage. Yoshio Tsuchiya,
a seasoned Akira
Kurosawa veteran, really gets a chance to
shine as the tormented Kasai and the film features
the beautiful Kumi
Mizuno in likely her greatest role. Takeshi
Kimura's script is one of his finest as well,
with well written, nicely developed characters
and a misanthropic tone. The film has the best
character development of any Honda film. When
the film begins, the characters are quite happy
and cheerful. However, once marooned on the island,
as time goes on, they become nastier and nastier
turning on each other before succumbing to the
almost sexual lure of the mushrooms. Kasai, in
particular, is a very well developed character,
he begins as a very well to do businessman, but
soon becomes a pathetic, tormented individual,
paying hundreds of thousands of yen to Kenji Sahara's
Koyama for turtles’ eggs.
When Matango came to the
US, it was apparently seen as unmarketable and
bypassed a theatrical release. With the hokey
title Attack of the Mushroom People, it
was released directly to TV by American International
Pictures. Though the film suffered only a few
seconds of cuts, it was presented in a badly dubbed,
hideous, somewhat red tinted 16mm print. The film
was thus often dismissed as camp, which is a real
shame, as Matango is actually a very serious film
and could very well be Honda’s masterpiece.
It’s an eerie, wonderful film that is anything
but a campy monster movie.
|
(5/5)