A Fungus Among Us

Film: Matango (Attack of the Mushroom People)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

Matango, also released as Attack of the Mushroom People, may be a film that is cursed with a poor name choice. Under the name Matango, there’s no clue what it’s going to be bout, and that’s going to keep some people away. Called Attack of the Mushroom People, it’s going to create some unrealistic expectations. The idea is an interesting one, though, and if you twist my arm, I’d suggest that there’s a little bit of influence here on the album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway by Genesis.

We will start, as many an adventure/horror film does, on a boat that soon becomes lost at sea. We have a veritable Gilligan’s Island here in the sense that we’re going to have seven people shipwrecked. First, we have to have a terrible storm that gets them knocked off course and into the middle of nowhere. Our people are Kenji Murai (Akira Kubo), a professor; his assistant Senzo Koyama (Kenji Sahara); writer Etsuro Yoshida (Hiroshi Tachikawa); celebrity and owner of the yacht Masafumi Kasai (Yoshio Tsuchiya); singer Mami Sekiguchi (Kumi Mizuno); student Akiko Soma (Miki Yashiro); and yacht captain Naoyuki Sakuda (Hiroshi Koizumi).

Ten Days of Terror!: Godzilla (Gojira)

Film: Godzilla (Gojira)
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on rockin’ flatscreen.

It’s easy to make fun of a film like Godzilla (or Gojira if you’re a purist), but that humor is frequently placed in the wrong direction. Godzilla movies did eventually get plenty silly, silly enough that some of them were eventually shown on Mystery Science Theater 3000. However, that’s something that could certainly be said of many horror franchises. Lots of them get silly. With Godzilla, it’s important to look at the first film. After, no horror fan would want to have A Nightmare on Elm Street judged by Freddy vs. Jason.

And, let’s be honest here, there’s plenty of things in Godzilla that are laughable. For starters, the science is ridiculous here. We’re told, for instance, that brontosaurus bones are about two million years old. Now, I’ll forgive the reference to brontosaurus, which was accepted in 1954 over the current designation of Apatosaurus, but two million years? And the trilobite fossils, which date in the multiple hundreds of millions of years old are also two million years old? A scientist creates a device that destroys oxygen? C’mon.