ATTACK OF THE MUSHROOM PEOPLE (1963)
Tagline: Castaway on a forbidden planet...Their craving for the strange exotic fruit...Drives them to madness...And unspeakable horror!
(Sci-Fi, Mystery, Fungi-Horror) [PG]
Note: This movie does not have any MPAA rating. It likely would have landed a PG rating if it came out today.
Aka. “MANTANGO”. Directed by Ishiro Honda this one probably counts as one of the weirdest
TOHO flicks out there. It starts off with a group of people that get shipwrecked on an island and slowly start to get hungry enough to eat the islands
mushrooms (largely at the urging of the mushrooms themselves). Kind of like
when you have another box of mac n cheese in the cabinet and you think you are
going to get through the night without eating it. You won’t…you know you won’t.
I wish there was more to this damn thing, but for all the praise it gets in
other reviews, I thought it was mediocre at best. It’s oddly shot, features
pretty terrible acting and it’s all that pleasant to look at.
For me the movie was the telling of a series of stupid ideas on the part of each of the stranded vessels crew and passengers. Almost no one in this film is even worth rooting for and the ending is given away in the first few frames as the only survivor is actually telling this story. Normally I don’t mind starting at the end if the story is intriguing enough. BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA does this perfectly. However if by the middle of the movie you pretty much could care which whiny soon to be victim ends up “mushroom-ized” you don’t have an effective story and at the point even if the direction was good, it matters less to audiences. On top of this the movie drags on and on and I often found myself almost completely checked out.
I will give a hats off to the effects for the time period and the sets are pretty nuts. We also do get a pretty crazy and creepy ending, but even that feels a bit ripped off of something the TWILIGHT ZONE had already been doing since 59’.
For me the movie was the telling of a series of stupid ideas on the part of each of the stranded vessels crew and passengers. Almost no one in this film is even worth rooting for and the ending is given away in the first few frames as the only survivor is actually telling this story. Normally I don’t mind starting at the end if the story is intriguing enough. BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA does this perfectly. However if by the middle of the movie you pretty much could care which whiny soon to be victim ends up “mushroom-ized” you don’t have an effective story and at the point even if the direction was good, it matters less to audiences. On top of this the movie drags on and on and I often found myself almost completely checked out.
I will give a hats off to the effects for the time period and the sets are pretty nuts. We also do get a pretty crazy and creepy ending, but even that feels a bit ripped off of something the TWILIGHT ZONE had already been doing since 59’.
Overall this thing gets a 2 out of 7.
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