Sci-Fi Film Fiesta, The Swingin' 60s - The Complete Book by Chris Christopoulos - HTML preview

“No matter how we feel, we just can’t give up”

Akiko and I later discovered Kasai had been tied up by Sakuda who “stole all the canned food and left us” by taking the yacht. “no it’s my turn to do something.” “I don’t know how many times I’ve written something like this in my novel.”

In the meantime Mami had freed Yoshida and they both attempted to take over the ship, with Yoshida announcing that it was now his time “to do something” and as he directed Akiko and I off the ship at gunpoint told us that he didn’t know many times he had written this scenario in his novels.

Suddenly Koyama appeared only to be shot dead by Yoshida. As this happened Murai and I managed to wrest the gun from Yoshida and force him and Mami off the ship. A poignant bit of irony lay before us as we witnessed Koyama’s corpse lying amidst the strewn banknotes highlighting a lesson that he failed to learn: that money has no value when there is nowhere to spend it.

“Now that you finally know what it means to ask for help”

Kasai was on the point of giving up and contemplated suicide but lacked the courage to do it and instead pleaded with me to end his life. Of course that was unthinkable. While Akiko and I left for a while and gave him a chance to rest, Mami apparently had returned to the ship and enticed the emotionally and psychologically distraught Kasai to follow her into the forest and eat the mushrooms.

The week long constant rainfall (which gave my dear sweet, innocent and pretty Akiko the clue that “it must be the rainy season”) had caused the mushrooms on the island to grow in great profusion. Kasai would’ve soon discovered that those who ate the mushrooms would turn into mushroom creatures themselves. Once he had succumbed to temptation and started eating the mushrooms he would not have been able to stop.

What kind of strange Eden was this island whereby Man is tempted by the forbidden fruit of the mushroom? Was Mami then some kind of an Eve? Just like this modern city beyond the window and the kind of civilization we have fashioned for ourselves, we in our modern metropolises surround ourselves with temptations, distractions and enticements that only serve to infect and imprison us making escape from our collective and individual Hell on earth seem futile.

was this the kind of vision Kasai experienced in his hallucinations after consuming Matango? His fate no doubt would be to wander the Purgatory of the island, an infected mutated denizen trapped, imprisoned and surrounded on all sides in his perverse new Eden.

“Tokyo is not very different from that island”

A little while later I spotted the yacht adrift off-shore and swam out towards it. On board I discovered a note written by Sakuda on an inside cabin wall listing the names of each of us on the island as dead:

“These people were cast ashore on a deserted island and died. I tried to escape and

reach help but I couldn’t make it and I died in the seas.

End Sakuda, Captain.”

In anger, disgust and frustration I drew a large ‘X’ over the note, a symbolic crossing out and admonition of the self-serving lies and self-justifications of a coward. It was little more than a suicide note left by Sakuda before he jumped into the sea after running out of food – food he had stolen from the rest of us!

I then made my way back to the derelict ship and Akiko. The poor little fool had just about given up hope and felt that it was better to just resign ourselves and eat the mushrooms believing that “if we can’t get off this island maybe there’s no other way to live.” It was at that point I declared my love for her. Perhaps our love would hold the answer to our survival by providing us with the power to resist succumbing to the temptation and resignation of living the life of a ‘mushroom person.’

Just as we were about to start preparations for leaving the island, several mushroom creatures entered the vessel and began attacking us. As I fought off some the attacking mushroom creatures with my gun, I became separated from Akiko who was soon kidnapped.

I went in search of Akiko and managed to track her down but to my dismay I discovered that she too had consumed mushrooms and had consequently begun to be infected. God knows I tried to rescue Akiko but I was quickly surrounded and overwhelmed by the mushroom creatures. I had no choice but to escape without her, and make my way onto the yacht and escape the island.

As you know after several days I was rescued where I now find myself here confined in this hospital room. Perhaps I would have been better off staying with Akiko on the island. [Turning to face the observing doctors, Murai’s face is revealed to show signs of being infected with the fungal growths.] “People in cities are cruel, aren’t they? It’s all the same. I’d be happier living on that island than in this city.”

[So ends the story of Matango as we come full circle with the neon-lighted city-scape coming into view through the hospital window to the accompaniment of the incessant, mechanical and dehumanizing pounding heartbeat of the metropolis.]

Points of Interest

Image by Chatgpt The film’s story was based on William Hope Hodgson's short story "The Voice in the Night", which originally appeared in the November 1907 issue of Blue Book, a copy of which is included with this post. Honda was also inspired by a news story about a group of rich kids who took their father's yacht far into the sea and had to be rescued, as well as on reports of ships and aircraft vanishing in the Bermuda Triangle.

Ishirō Honda is known for his kaiju (giant monster) films as well as horror films with sci-fi elements like Matango such as The H-Man (1958) and The Human Vapor (1960) which feature characters that transform into bizarre beings.

Attack of the Mushroom People is both visually and thematically quite a dark and serious film with a fairly slow and measured pace, focusing quite a bit on psychological and social elements.

This was Honda's first film to use the Oxberry optical printer, which enabled up to five composite shots to be superimposed thereby avoiding the need for costly hand-painted mattes and glass shots.

Apparently Matango was nearly banned in Japan because some of the makeup was uncomfortably similar to the facial disfigurements suffered by those who survived the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Matango was Honda's first science fiction film not to receive a theatrical release in the United States. American International Television released it directly to television in 1965 as Attack of the Mushroom People with a run-time of 88 minutes. By the early 1990s the film had all but disappeared into obscurity for many years.

Ishiro Honda’s film seems to question the direction that society was taking as it emerged from the atomic ashes of the Second World War, foreign occupation and its imperialist and militaristic past. There seemed to be concern being expressed about his society as it forged ahead into a modern Western / American-oriented future while being consumed by its many dehumanizing temptations. The true horror of this modernity is revealed in which people become almost like castaways in mind, spirit and body and can thereby be transformed so easily into hideous monsters under the right circumstances.

In the film, it is not so much the walking mushroom people that pose the main threat. Instead, it is the self-serving and self-destructive impulses and greedy, selfish desires of the human castaways that form the real danger. The film’s fungal monsters represent what these morally weak and corrupt humans ultimately become.

The human castaways represent a cross-section of a modern affluent, liberal society ranging from the wealthy and prosperous, corporate industrial, the arts and academia through to the skilled worker. All manage to find themselves infected by the temptations offered by materialism and the addiction to consumption while being motivated by self-interest with the result that their individual human identities are subsumed into something monstrous. Perhaps we come to recognize something about ourselves: lives cast adrift wrapped within a fog destined to exist in a modern Purgatory from which there is no escape and no alternative can be imagined.

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Night Caller from Outer Space (1965)

An intelligent well-acted science fiction thriller despite budgetary constraints and a

rather ludicrous plot.

Directed by John Gilling

Written by Frank Crisp (1963 novel)

Screenplay: Jim O'Connolly

Produced by Ronald Liles

Cinematography: Stephen Dade

Edited by: Philip Barnikel

Music composed and directed by: John Gregory Production company: Armitage Film Productions Ltd. Distributed by: Butcher's Film Service (UK)

Running time: 85 minutes

Country: United Kingdom

Cast

John Saxon as Dr. Jack Costain

Maurice Denham as Dr. Morley

Patricia Haines as Ann Barlow

Alfred Burke as Detective Supintendent Hartley John Carson as the Major

Warren Mitchell as Reg Lilburn

Marianne Stone as Madge Lilburn

Stanley Meadows as Detective Tom Grant

Aubrey Morris as Thorburn

Ballard Berkeley as Commander Savage

Geoffrey Lumsden as Colonel Davy

Tom Gill as Police Commissioner's secretary

Jack Watson as Sergeant Hawkins

Barbara French as Joyce Malone

From the cold void of Jupiter’s moon, Ganymede… comes a terrifying

quest for Earth’s women!… SEE IT… if you dare!

A mysterious sphere crashes to Earth… unlocking a nightmare beyond

imagination that will surely SHATTER YOUR SENSES!

Clawing its way out of the shadows… a hideous creature on a mission

of interplanetary survival!… DON’T LOOK AWAY!

Science cannot stop it… the military cannot contain it… and young

women everywhere… are its PREY!

Image generated by Chatgpt