Matango | aka Attack of the Mushroom People (1963) Review

“Matango” Japanese Theatrical Poster

AKA: Fungus of Terror
Director: Ishiro Honda
Cast: Akira Kubo, Kumi Mizuno, Kenji Sahara, Hiroshi Koizumi, Yoshio Tsuchiya, Kenji Sahara, Kenji Sahara, Hiroshi Tachikawa, Miki Yashiro, Hideyo Amamoto
Running Time: 89 min.

By Kelly Warner

Before 1954, director Ishiro Honda worked in multiple genres, including romantic dramas, documentaries, and war pictures. After directing the original Godzilla in 1954, Honda became Toho’s go-to man for their kaiju films and special effects extravaganzas thanks to his skill, speedy productions, and a good working relationship with special effects master Eiji Tsuburaya. Honda was quite proud of his work in the sci-fi genre (as he should’ve been), but he’d never envisioned himself as a sci-fi director and he longed to have more variety in his filmography. Toho liked what he did for Godzilla, though – Honda remains the fan-favorite director of most Godzilla fans – and by 1960 they rarely let him work in other genres. Even when he got away from the kaiju, Honda still mainly worked in sci-fi, fantasy, and horror, though on a more human scale. Films like The Human Vapor, The Mysterians, and Matango may lack the name-recognition of Honda’s kaiju flicks, but the quality was still there. I’d even say that Ishiro Honda’s human scale fantasy films are some of Japanese cinema’s least appreciated gems in the West.

Matango is Honda’s darkest film since the original Godzilla. It’s a cynical story about a group of seven friends and colleagues who go on a boating trip, get lost in a storm, and end up stranded on a deserted island. Things get worse from there. The island has no animals or safe edible vegetation. At one point, the men are out hunting for birds when a gull flies towards the island, only to turn around and head back out to sea. The survivors find a derelict ship meant for scientific research washed up on the shore. It’s covered with thick, colorful mold. The logbooks tell of a new mushroom native to the island called matango. If eaten, the matango mushroom causes hallucinations and poisons the body, making you grow hideous, turning you into a mushroom.

You are what you eat.

The matango mushroom is the only plentiful thing on the island. With food stocks running low, it’s not long before someone takes a bite. Once the mushroom is eaten, that person finds bliss as they lose their humanity. Matango becomes a film about paranoia as no one knows who they can trust. Old friends turn on each other. The mushroom people try to spread the joy of their new lifeform. It’s dark, grim stuff. Think Gilligan’s Island meets The Thing and you’re not far off.

Matango meant a great deal to Honda at the time and it was something of a passion project for the director. Thanks to the money he’d made for Toho with the Godzilla series, Honda had earned the right to make a film for himself. And while Matango would go on to be a financial success for the studio, Toho cut down on similar personal projects afterwards. Matango’s screenwriter Takeshi Kimura was so displeased with Toho’s decision on the matter that he would continue under a penname for many of his future films. Kimura was credited as Kaoru Mabuchi for kaiju classics War of the Gargantuans, Destroy All Monsters, and the wonderfully weird Godzilla vs. Hedorah. As film historian David Kalat noted in his book A Critical History and Filmography of Toho’s Godzilla Series, Matango’s themes can be compared to selling out. The only way to be happy was to eat the mushroom/work with the studio, whereas going it alone leads to madness and isolation.

In Japan, the special effects and the drama were commonly handled by two different crews and directors. In the good old days at Toho that meant that Honda directed the actors and Eiji Tsuburaya would shoot the kaiju and destroy the miniatures. Since Matango was a horror story shot on a human scale, that allowed Tsuburaya the rare chance to work more directly with the cast. His makeup art turned actors into hideous monsters with impressive results. The older mutated mushroom people more closely resemble giant mushrooms and are kind of silly, but the eerie sound effects make the monsters work. Supposedly Matango was nearly banned in Japan because the mutated people resembled the victims of the atomic bomb.

The cast reads like a who’s who of Ishiro Honda’s regular players. Akira Kubo (Destroy All Monsters) plays the professor, the moral center of the group and the film’s main character. The beautiful and talented Kumi Mizuno (Monster Zero) plays a singer who enjoys the fact that multiple men lust after her. Yoshio Tsuchiya (The Mysterians) plays the wealthy owner of the boat and thinks that money can buy him anything. Hiroshi Koizumi (Mothra vs. Godzilla) plays the ship’s skipper who feels disrespected by Tsuchiya’s character, as he’s the skipper in title only. Kenji Sahara (Rodan) plays against type as the ship’s scruffy first mate. Even Godzilla suit-actor Haruo Nakajima is in the film, here playing one of the mutated mushroom people.

When the film was released in America it was given the unfortunate title of Attack of the Mushroom People. The film has a cult status and is either remembered as one of the worst horror films of all time or one of the most underrated and underseen classics of the genre. Me, I love Matango, it’s one of my favorite films. I realize that my rating will seem high to some people, but that’s just how I see the film and I feel like rating it any lower would make for a dishonest review.

When asked for his favorite of the films he’d directed, Ishiro Honda apparently chose Matango. While my favorite Honda film remains the original Godzilla, I would probably rank Matango as my second favorite. Sure, some it is dated and other parts were probably cheesy back in 1963, but I love it anyway. I rewatch the film at least once a year. As a fan of Ishiro Honda, Japanese cinema, and horror films in general, Matango has just about everything I’d want from a classic Toho genre film.

Kelly Warner’s Rating: 9/10