"Monster A Go-Go" was supposed to be the first feature film for Bill Rebane, who started filming this thing in 1961. His monster flick, originally called "Terror At Halfday", had a budget of 80.000 dollars, which was pretty much gone after a couple of days of filming. After he ran out of funding the film lay on the shelf for about four years, unfinished and with no hope (or desire) of actually being released.Cue Herschell Gordon Lewis (of "Blood Feast" fame), always on the look-out for the cheapest way he could get a film released. So he bought the abandoned footage from "Terror At Halfday" and 'finished' the movie. To cut costs, he decided to only ask a couple of performers back, which did not include Henry Hite. I should point out Henry Hite played the monster. He finished this monster flick ... without the monster. That's one of the main reasons why this movie feels like such a blatantly cynical cash grab.So Lewis only had a tiny little bit of footage shot with Henry Hite, and none of that footage could be edited to look like an actual ending. Lewis 'solved' that problem by creating one of the saddest anti-climaxes in the history of filmmaking. I honestly can't imagine how the people that paid to see this left the theatre after this screening. To quote Rich Hall: "It was so bad I wanted everyone's money back!". That was about a Bob Dylan concert, but it works equally well for this movie.For what it's worth: Rebane actually did try to shoot a big climax for this, that's actually the main reason the budget ran out so quickly. Some of the ending scenes feature dozens of extras, so that's clearly Rebane's footage. Lewis really wouldn't bother to do any of that. In later interviews Rebane has stated he hates this movie even more than the audience does, and I can't blame him. Lewis didn't even put his name on it, Rebane is the only credited director. Did I mention he only sold his "Terror At Halfday" footage for 8.000 dollars, while it cost ten times as much to film? I guess he got a really quick course on how film business worked.

Ten years before unleashing that seventh layer of hell known as THE GREAT SPIDER INVASION, Bill Rebane along with fellow Z-movie auteur Herschell Gordon Lewis directed this miserable piece of cow dung.The sorry mess immediately started when Rebane ran out of money while making the film. Gee, no wonder he couldn't afford useful filmmaking tools like boom mikes or a decent script that wasn't written on cocktail napkins. And that's when The Godfather of Gore came along.While planning a not-so-important double feature, Lewis bought MONSTER A-GO GO from the desperate director. Under the hands of good old H.G. Lewis, extra scenes and dialog were added which created an avalanche of bad continuity. The result was a weird, incoherent disaster-piece of minor proportions. The only good thing about the movie was seeing the monster, but I didn't see any go-go dancers. At least that could have been interesting to watch! I don't mind a bad movie now or then, but watching the film with the MST3K commentary didn't help matters at all. I would rather watch FINAL JUSTICE or SANTA CLAUS CONQUERS THE MARTIANS ten times in a row than sit through MONSTER A-GO GO any day of the week.

Films like Monster a-Go Go feel sent from some other realm to test me. I love old fashioned trash cinema, I'm a great fan of Plan 9 From Outer Space and regard Manos: The Hands of Fate as a near classic, neither with irony. But sometimes a film catches me off-guard with boredom and ineptitude that just can't compute and I break down into boredom, minutes dragging out interminably as my face droops and eyes seek to pull shut. Such was the case here, much as I tried my best. To be fair to the film it never stood much of a chance, originally an unfinished Bill Rebane project, bought up and completed with new footage by HG Lewis. Sanity and coherence were obviously not going to be on the menu here but what really rankles is the lack of interest. The plot isn't too bad, pitting scientists against a poor irradiated astronaut with a deadly touch, but nearly everything in the execution goes wrong. First there are traditional problems. The film all too often opts to tell rather than show events (what it does show is mostly tedious, the camera doesn't even search out images of interesting irrelevance to settle on), and not only that but the narration even spoils scenes just before they take place. Also, there are a number of sound goofs, including numerous occasions where speech is simply too muffled to make out. The music isn't much cop either, nor the acting, but I guess that is somewhat to be expected. The writing has virtually no interest, neither drawing interesting characters nor spinning out fun technical nonsense, it merely drags, with patches of pointless filler that disgrace pointless filler scenes everywhere. Perhaps most irritating is the lack of monster action. Many a terrible film has pulled off an acceptable level of entertainment just by getting a creature on screen and offing people at an acceptable rate (The Creeping Terror a perfect example of this) but Monster a-Go Go has just a handful of kills, only one of them effective. This is made extra galling by the fact that the monster is simply a tall gentleman in paste face make up that can't have taken more than a few minutes to plaster on, and so can hardly have been a big drain on the budget. He actually looks effective in his few appearances (one of the films few pluses) and really, really should have done more. A couple more spots of fun elevate this just above lobotomy inducing, best being one of the most inept scientists I've ever seen in a film like this. He does nothing right, from helping cause the monster by doing something stupid, then letting the monster cause more damage than it might have done by doing something more stupid. In a moment of almost inspired comedy he even sheepishly owns up to his own ineptitude, which I must admit made me smile. There is also a mostly pointless dancing scene which probably only appeals to fans of pointless dancing scenes (ie. people like me) so thats a plus, and there's the ending. It is breathtakingly useless and therefore memorable. Yes, I know that isn't a good thing to most people. Altogether this film is pretty much atrocious, and not in a good way. Exercise caution before viewing would be my advice.

I watched the MST3K version of this movie, and I don't think I could have watched the original version. This was just too boring & confusing of a movie to watch without someone making fun of it. The audio was atrocious and it was hard to make out what the actors were saying, not to mention that some of the sound effects were way too loud for the action (which made not only Joel & the bots jump, but me as well). The one scene were the guy goes "brrring" before he answers the phone is priceless. I suspect they meant to overdub a ringing phone sound effect at that point but forgot to. The tiny space capsule was also quite laughable.The ending, though, is totally anticlimactic, pointless, and confusing. Two men in radiation suits are chasing the monster through the sewers when all of a sudden it disappears, and a telegram arrives saying that the missing astronaut was found safe & sound in the Atlantic Ocean. We're supposed to be left pondering whether or not the monster was the astronaut and how the monster disappeared the moment the astronaut was found. But it rather gives the impression that they didn't really have an ending for the movie and hurriedly wrote one.Overall, this is one of the worst movies of all time and deserves its spot in the bottom 100.