Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People Review
What a strange little find this is ... best known for dipping into the current crop of extreme cult titles coming out of Japan Media Blasters' Tokyo Shock label is now dipping into the vaults of Japan's venerable Toho studios and pulling out a selection of forgotten b-movie classics. One of the first is Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People, directed by Ishiro Honda of Godzilla fame.
Originally released in 1963 when Toho was cranking out kaiju - giant monster - pictures en masse Matango, despite its title, features very little in the way of attacking mushroom people. Oh, they're there, but the film has other things on its mind for most of the running time.
Matango opens ... well ... it opens like Gilligan's Island. A group of young, wealthy people are out for a cruise on a pleasure yacht when they are caught unexpectedly in a major storm. The yacht takes major damage, the radio and emergency sstems break down, and the drift aimlessly until they finally arrive at a mysterious fog enshrouded island. They appear to be alone, but are they really? They soon come across the wreck of a scientific survey ship but there is no sign of the crew - not even corpses. As they forage for food they quickly realize that this is a fairly barren land with little to offer; even the birds seem to stay away. All the island has in abundance are mushrooms - the titular matango - but an entry in the science ship's log warns of serious side effects if the mushrooms are eaten.
The characters of the film have obviously been chosen to represent different classes and types. There is the intellectual, the innocent, the famous entertainer, the serious artist, the competent sailor, the hired hand and the idly rich. The first task of the film is to explore the relationships and interactions between these classes, the natural alliances and inevitable tensions that crop up as the group struggles to survive. Under the guise of a campy creature feature Matango attempts some fairly serious social commentary and does a decently good job of it.
Task number two? Anti drug hysteria! It was made in the early sixties, after all, and there are shades of Reefer Madness to be found. When the castaways finalky turn to the mushrooms as a food source they discover - you guessed it - that they are of the magic variety, bringing on visions and euphoria with a major side effect: one taste is enough to turn you into a raving addict that wants only to eat even more mushrooms while the strange neural toxins the mushrooms contain slowly turn you into a mushroom yourself.
Matango is paced more slowly than most Toho fare and seems as though it actually was meant to be taken seriously. That seriousness makes it drag some in the early going,though it does have a certain undeniable charm. Still, more hysteria and less commentary would have made for a more entertaining film.
The DVD does a remarkably good job of setting the film into context. Special effects man Teruyoshi Nakano explains the effects processes and innovations of the time, writer Masami Fukushima delivers a spoken word piece and, quite surprisingly with a film this old, lead actor Akira Kubo offers up a commentary track. The colors appear a little washed out but the transfer is perfectly clean and clear. To up the camp value a bit Media Blasters have even included the 1963 english language dub track along with the original Japanese.
