Sunday, February 3, 2013

Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People (1963)

Apparently this is a good movie with a lot of underlying social commentary. But I seem to have stumbled upon the badly dubbed US version.

While on a cruise, a problem with the yacht leaves the group stranded on an island.  There is the skipper, a professor, a starlet, a girl next door type, Gilligan, and two more.  Well, his name isn't really named Gilligan but he does have the same hat and red shirt, the boat had five passengers and two crew members, plus the characters are almost the same.

The group finds an abandoned ship covered in fungus. Actually fungus is all over the island.  They decide to clean off the ship and use it as shelter until they either figure out how to fix the boat or are  rescued.

There is no fresh food so they decide to eat something they found on the fungus ship.  In the ships journal, there is a warning not to eat the mushrooms.  But eventually they succumb to hunger, even though it's obvious that something is terribly wrong, hence the lack of living beings on the fungus ship and the warnings in the journal.

The group starts fighting and people who eat the mushrooms start going nutzo.  The starlet gets one guy  to eat mushrooms. He sees flashy, flashy mushroom lights and various hallucinations.  Everyone eating mushrooms starts going insane.  However I must point out that I found this movie to be severely lacking in mushroom people.  I guess from the title I was expecting a huge group of mushroom people to attack, but it was not to be.

Best badly dubbed lines -

"I hire people to think for me and then I just use their thoughts."

"If I was really in love with her I should have eaten the mushroom."

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