Thursday, September 8, 2011

A 'SHROOM OF ONE'S OWN

This weekend we enjoyed excellent pizza at Mellow Mushroom at Norterra, so...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...let's grant the honor to the title character of 1963's Matango, one of the strangest & best of the Toho shockers...

Matango is a variety of fungus found by a shipwrecked party on a remote island. It's temptingly tasty, but it has some distressing long-term side effects if you eat too much...


Long known on American late-night TV as Attack of the Mushroom People, the film has a more unsettling atmosphere than one might expect, & it even struggles a bit with the question of how much difference there is between a modern city dweller & a mushroom person.

It's based, by the way, on the 1907 story "A Voice in the Night" by William Hope Hodgson. You can & should read it here; it's creepy.

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