Thiel-a-Vision Review: Matango

Unlike most of the other films in my DVD collection, I was only vaguely familiar with Matango when I bought it. I had seen it on Saturday afternoon TV in the '70s, when it aired under the unpromising title Attack of the Mushroom People. While it hails from Japan's Toho studios, and features rubber-suited monsters, it lacks the city-smashing carnage of the Godzilla films and hence was of less interest to my younger self. 

Since then, I'd read several positive reviews that made me feel that I'd missed something. I'm happy to report that they were correct. It's certainly no classic, but it's a solid, weird horror film with more of a point than one might expect.

Matango plays out like a perverse version of Gilligan's Island, though it's worth noting that it came out the year before the TV comedy. The film literally features "seven stranded castaways": a skipper, his first mate, a millionaire, a movie star, a professor, a young girl and...a mystery writer. (Six out of seven isn't bad.) Out on a pleasure cruise, the weather starts getting rough, and the tiny ship is tossed. However, instead of washing up on a sunny, inviting tropical shore, the castaways find themselves on a fog-bound rock devoid of animal life. (The birds won't even come near.)

Short of supplies and with few edible plants available, they set out across the island to find a mysterious, abandoned research vessel covered in fungal growths. While they never find out the entire story of this lost expedition--which took pains to cloak its origin in secrecy--they learn that it was investigating radiation. The source of the radiation is never explained, but it doesn't seem to be dangerous...aside from its possible effect on the oversized mushrooms that cover the island.  

Initial tensions between the haves and have-nots eventually degenerate into open violence as the food runs out and the possibility of survival lessens. Lust and gluttony rear up, especially when, one by one, the castaways succumb to the edible, addictive fungus. Creatures which appear to the transformed remnants of the previous expedition roam the island, and days of rain cause the mushrooms to grow ever larger, becoming a vast, colorful forest.

While it's not jump-out-of-your-skin scary, Matango winds up being very creepy, with its overwhelming sense of decay and hallucinogenic scenes accompanied by the sounds of giggling mushrooms. (Yes, I wrote "giggling mushrooms.") One does have to overlook the somewhat silly rubber suits that depict the final stage of the mutated fungal creatures, but for the most part, the monsters are wisely kept out of full view. It's not a true Lovecraftian horror show, but it does share H.P.'s themes of spiraling madness and bodily transformation, and the protagonist's final, terrible exclamation is straight out of the Necronomicon playbook.   

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