When Kasai shoots at Yoshida and Mami as he chases them off the boat, you can see the bullets ricochet off the ground before he fires a shot.
At the beginning when Kenji starts telling his story, there is nothing on his face, but at the end, it has mushrooms on it.
Now this has got to be one of the daftest sci-fi concepts I have ever seen yet it isn't garbage. The premiss is that a group of pals are blown aground from their pleasure cruise by a storm.
1963's "Matango" proved a rare Toho venture into outright horror for director Ishiro Honda and special effects maestro Eiji Tsuburaya, eerily foreshadowing the Sherwood Schwartz TV series GILLIGAN'S ISLAND with its cast of 7 characters of all social types. Only two women are aboard for this pleasure cruise, Kumi Mizuno as sexy chanteuse Mami Sekiguchi, and Miki Yashiro as university student Akiko Soma, the hero young psychology professor Kenji Murai (Akira Kubo), who is in love with Akiko.
William Hope Hodgson was a British writer of ghost and horror stories at the turn of the 20th century. He authored some great works and remains a favourite to this day, but what does he have to do with a Japanese B-movie (from Ishiro Honda, the guy who directed GODZILLA no less) made half a century later?
This was a pleasant surprise. I remembered seeing about 15 minutes of this about 30 years ago, and I was interested to see how well "Matango" held up.
After seeing all the positive reviews on IMDb, I thought I would give this one a try. I liked the first half of the film, the acting was good especially for a B grade horror, the characters seemed to be nicely developed , the build up was neat & eerie at an almost perfect pace.
Toho Productions presents a really strange, mysterious and inspired horror treat. However those looking for cheap thrills and something kitsch would be disappointed.
The score here is rather high, but this movie to me was kind of low. Low and really slow.
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!
Purely because not all their contemporary monster movies could feature big mutated lizards (Godzilla), flying turtles (Gamera) or humongous moths (Mothra), the Japanese also made a monster movie with giant mushrooms! Well, I say "the Japanese" but basically it's once again just the one and only legendary director Ishirô Honda who was responsible for yet another imaginative and extremely entertaining cult classic.
