MATANGO @ 60

A man in a hospital gown looks out at a neon Tokyo and tells us that we might think he's crazy but what he's about to say is true. Suddenly, we're on the high seas on a yacht on a three hours tour, with Etsuro, the skipper, too, a millionaire and his wife, a cabaret star, the professor and Akiko. They are caught in a storm which almost sinks the boat and disables it, setting them adrift. Eventually, through the pervasive fog, an island is spotted. Yay! But there's something wrong. It's completely silent, even seagulls shun it and over there is an old grounded sailing ship which is coated in mould. They work out it was a research ship and find a sealed chest containing a massive multicoloured mushroom and some notes on the strangeness of the fungus. All the mirrors on the ship have been broken. This is the weirdest Marie Celeste story ever. It gets odder to the extent that, even though it was made before the emergence of both, this is Gilligan's Island as imagined by David Cronenberg.

While the party does find some fresh water and are wary of eating the mushrooms all around the island, (they find a small stock of tinned foods and some edible roots) there is an undercurrent of dissension among them about how they should proceed. They've already heard a news report on radio about the search for them being called off. There is movement in the jungle and strange bipedal figures are lurking, coming closer to the ship, braving the humans and then menacing them. As the ship's log continues to be investigated it's clear that the area has been affected by nuclear weapons testing.

Now, you might be putting post-war Japanese cinema, Toho Studios, the dangers of nuclear power and mutation together and you'd be right. Ishiro Honda who adapted and directed this was already a veteran of Japanese monster movies, having made the king of them in 1954 with Gojira which you might know better as Godzilla. If that sends you into visions of actors in rubber suits destroying model railway stations then you haven't seen the film, only those made in its image. Gojira is a story of the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the dire, earth-threatening consequences of fucking with the fabric of the universe (and killing masses of people and mutating even more). In a radius of about twenty years every Japanese movie that wasn't a neo-realist character piece or a Yakuza epic made mention, however obtusely, to the atom bombs.

Here, the nature-bending forces of nuclear fission have created mushrooms that consume humans, changing them, patch of skin by patch of skin, into big spooring monsters. One of them actually resembles a mushroom cloud on legs. It's not just that, you can turn just by eating them and they are instantly addictive. The more you eat, the more you become what you eat. 

This metaphor is not entirely Honda's doing. When I first saw the film (at the Time Capsules microcinema in the 2000s) I recognised the source material immediately. When I was a child I took possession of a large volume of weird tales from our home library. It had an embossed cover and some of the stories had thrilling illustrations. One story (not illustrated but it didn't need to be) was A Voice in the Night by William Hope Hodgson. An old timey sailing ship heaves to in a fog. The watch is disturbed by a cry from the water. A man in a row boat tells a tale of a ship that went through a similar fog and was overcome by a fungus ... I'll let you find the story yourself. It's a great yarn and available to read free online. Matango is the origin story of A Voice in the Night.

While the middle act drags from the shifting allegiances and some repetition, the opening is arresting as the shipwrecked party live through the strange situation on board and discover the stranger one on the island, and the final act is warpo scene after warpo scene as the ugly consequences of ignoring nature's warnings play out in a proto body horror orgy of doom. Back at the hospital, we understand the opening statement and see the pervasion of the perversion.

Honda shoots in deep colour, going from studio, set-based scenes (most of them) to extraordinary world building exteriors where the press of the grey overcast leaves only the rough black rocky sand below. The island is a rich tropical green but we know it's all poison. There is a remarkable lack of saturation, that postcard look of mid century colour films. It's odd matt finish made me question its vintage. All I could say for certain was that it was not of the then recent J-Horror canon as it had none of the studied green-grey pallet and deep shadow or unsettling oozing electronic music. There is electronic music in the jungle but it is more incorporated into the atmospherics and largely confined to the use of a metallic delay effect to suggest a kind of communication between the matango mushrooms. 

This is the kind of film that goes under many titles for international release, usually lurid misinterpretations to go with increasingly sensationalist poster art. Attack of the Mushroom People, Fungus of Terror, and so on. Matango is the name of the virus and you have to follow the dialogue and details of the tale to pick that up. Just as Gojira has as much do to with science out of control and guilt as it does a monster, Matango touches effortlessly on the responsibility of doomsday weapons and their reach, addiction, the worrying ease of people with moving on before examining the path ahead and the doom of accepting the worst. The second time we see the bright lights of Tokyo (a brilliant piece of set design, not intended for a second to lull anyone into thinking they are seeing the real thing) we are looking at a different world.