1960s SF film
Matango, 1963, Japan DIRECTED BY ISHIRÔ HONDA
Forget the alternate titles Attack of the Killer Mushrooms, Attack of the Mushroom People or Fungus of Terror: these just turn to pulp what is otherwise a solid yet mildly disturbing movie, one that many of the cast and crew agreed was the best work they'd ever done, probably because they were in the very safe hands of director Ishirô Honda and producers Toho Studio. Honda made this as a diversion between two Godzilla movies, but Matango benefits enormously from being more explicitly a movie about false friendships and some of the jealousies engendered by status, over and above being just an encounter with mutant monsters. The source is William Hope Hodgson's short story 'The Voice in the Night', and tells of a yacht that becomes stranded on a Pacific island after a storm, and where the native mushrooms have an extreme effect on the people who eat them. The most memorable thing about Matango is the way Honda incrementally builds the strangeness into the story until it completely takes over, from the initial hallucinations to the claustrophobic scenes on the abandoned research ship, all the way to the later scenes of immersion in the consequences of succumbing to the mushrooms' allure, put across mostly by some excellent sound effects. Unavoidable is the reference to the effect of psilocybin and eating hallucinogenic mushrooms - it's only mentioned once yet this element seems to hang over the entire film as if it were waiting for a screen credit all of its own (and magic mushrooms were freely available in Japan until only relatively recently). This is a frequently bleak movie that builds tension superbly as the yacht crew and passengers figure out what's going on, yet at the same time fall to in-fighting as they literally lose their humanity in their struggle for survival. The scary parts aren't in the least bit scary but they can still unsettle you on a slightly deeper level, which altogether makes this a rather understated yet unusually haunting monster movie.
( Cross-posted with cult_movie)