Looking more like giant asparagus plants that walk rather than the delicious mushrooms as described by the Rita Moreno like Japanese sex kitten, the mushroom people come to life and make me glad that I did not utilize these 'shrooms for my regular egg dish. Starting off like a Japanese "Gilligan's Island", this unintentional comedy is a hoot from start to finish, and had me in stitches from the moment I recognized a song number that Gilda Radner had utilized in "It Came From Hollywood" (which this obviously didn't) as part of the "musical memories segment". The sexy nightclub songstress obviously gets her thrills by being the center of attention as she roams around the S.S. Minnow (or whatever it was called) singing "La da da la da da da da la la....", lyrics that translate easily into English or whatever language you manage to find this dubbed in and ones that Radner had described as "truly memorable". A storm shipwrecks them, just like the seven stranded castaways, and as luck would have it, they find an abandoned ship three times the size of their own. The problem is that it has definitely had its share of storms beating on it, and the captain's log only reveals that pretty much everybody has either completely disappeared or died. Upon venturing into the strange jungle, several of the passengers begin to snack on the delicious mushrooms they have previously been warned about, but even one bite I guess is too much.With the cast of about 10 men and 2 women (the other one being very shy and jealous of the singing sex kitten), there is bound to be some fighting over the ladies aboard. The jealous skipper fires shots as one of them leaves with the first mate (No little buddy this one), and the two don't even flinch. The jungle looks like something you'd see in an "Alice in Wonderland" tale, colorful but deadly, and when the giant walking toad stools appear, they seem to laugh nefariously. This whole film is a delicious hoot, nothing like any of the other dozens of Asian science fiction films I've seen, including the TV series of "Ultra Man". While I had hopped to find an English dubbed version, I was perfectly happy with the subtitled print I found to go along with another copy I managed to locate in Spanish!

One of my favorite activities in my childhood days was to check out the TV section of the newspaper to see if a monster movie will be running that night, and if it was, I'd check my monster book, draw movie posters and put them up on the wall, and when the movie started, I would turn the lights of with a bag of pop cones and pretend I was watching the movie on the big screen. I think it was around 1970 when the movie aired on Japanese TV and I sat there in the darkened room but the movie was so scary that in the last 15 minutes when the mushrooms actually appear in their full-fledged form, I couldn't keep watching the film because of the creepiness and the tension that had built up in the last hour and 15 minutes was just too much for a 7 year old.The next day I asked a friend if he saw the movie till the end what happened at the end. He told me that the professor blew up the island and the mushrooms all died. I believed this kid for about 30 years until I had the chance to watch the movie again when I realized that this friend hadn't had the guts to watch the movie till the end either.Even as a kid I could feel the tension and desperation that dominates the entire film but more so as an adult and still give you that heavy feeling in your stomach. Compared to modern films it is a bit too slow and a bit too heavy. Risk feeling depressed and stressed after watching the film. Not recommended when feeling down or tired. Still a good movie overall.

Considering how many bad horror films were made in Japan in the 1960s, I was expecting something no better than a Gamera movie. Fortunately, it was far better than the title would suggest! After all, when I was a kid, it was marketed as "Attack of the Mushroom People".The first 90% of the film is pretty good and is highly reminiscent of "Lord of the Flies". A group of people are on a sailboat but are nearly lost in a storm. Being blown way off course and having a broken shortwave radio, it looks pretty tough for them. It's even worse when they finally find land but it turns out to be an island that seems to have little food--just lots and lots of mushrooms and fungi. To make things worse, if they eat the mushrooms, they are doomed to turn into mushroom people--though the film never adequately explained how they knew this to be the case or that they shouldn't eat the mushrooms but they tried eating practically everything else! What I liked about this aspect of the film is that the people began acting like animals due to the food shortage. Seemingly decent people began scheming and killing and it revealed some excellent insights into the dark side of human nature.However, the last few minutes of the film consisted of the mushroom monsters mucking about and this was incredibly silly. Still, despite this, the very end of the film did have a nice conclusion and the idea wasn't bad--until the mushroom monsters appeared!

Now this was quite a pleasant surprise. If you read the title, "Matango:Attack of the Mushroom People", the idea of a film legitimately creeping you out with it's "under the skin" effectiveness probably wasn't as expected as a cheesy monster movie. This film's premise is simple..a group of Japanese friends are on a yachting trip when their boat is viciously damaged by a major storm. They find, through a heavy fog, this island which has no known forms of life except growing mushrooms thereabouts and a massive derelict oceanographic ship overcome by moss and rot. There are some food rations and booze within that derelict ship, but a couple of the group steal more than their share. Soon, the relationships of these unfortunate souls deteriorate as hunger, jealousy, fear, and insanity overcome them. But, the deck becomes even more stacked when, one by one, each individual succumbs to the delicious mushrooms nearby the derelict and face the horrifying fact that in doing so, like a plague, their human bodies become ravaged internally which soon shows externally..they, like others whose ships were caught in the current that affected our protagonists stranding them on the island, steadily grow into mushroom people! The final climax as our hero, the professor, is trying to escape the clutches of these mushroom monstrosities(..the sound effects of echoing sinister laughter is eerie)after his love-interest, a weak school clerk, is trapped within the lair of these creatures, is quite unsettling.Along with "Gojira", this has to be considered director Ishirô Honda's finest hour..he creates this incredibly disturbing experience that is hard to shake. I tried just to imagine the terrifying ordeal that would be if I were in that professor's shoes, trying to forge his way through the scary mushroom monsters closing in from every corner. I think the film, besides the mushroom monsters that rear their ugly heads at the end, works well at building the suspense thanks to this practically hopeless situation the characters find themselves in..coupling that hopeless situation with a growing mistrust, anger & hidden feelings which come up to the surface away from their civilized world of modern Tokyo, as tension becomes so thick you can cut it with a knife and tempers flare quite often as pressure for survival squeezes them dry.