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).

Let the Bodies Hit the Floor

Film: Bodies Bodies Bodies
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on rockin’ flatscreen.

Genres go through very definite periods where tropes get changed or rewritten or played with. Scream did that for slasher movies, and after its release there have been a number of slasher and horror films that played with the idea of being more meta. Bodies Bodies Bodies appears to be at least in part another step in the evolution of modern horror and horror-adjacent movies. This is as much a commentary on many aspects of modern culture as it is a bloody whodunnit.

The elevator pitch here is that a group of very privileged 20-somethings who have known each other for years decide to have a party at the opulent house of one of their number during a hurricane and things get out of hand quickly. There’s a lot more that goes into it, but that really is the basics of the film. Our group of friends is going to include a couple of outsiders including who is clearly going to be our final girl since she is the character we tend to focus on.

Three Rings of Danger

Film: Circus of Horrors
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

The “there are two types of people” idea is one that is pretty played out, but I think it’s also true in some cases. It’s kind of true or almost true when it comes to circuses. I think you either like them or don’t. I don’t in general. They’re hot and smell bad and always feel dirty on more than just the physical level to me. So, that being the case, Circus of Horrors was not an easy sell for me.

Beyond my dislike of circuses, though, I love the idea of this movie. We start with Dr. Rossiter (Anton Diffring), a plastic surgeon who is convinced of his own genius. He’s wanted by the police for a botched operation on a socialite named Evelyn Morley (Colette Wilde). Rossiter evades capture along with his assistants Angela (Jane Hylton) and Martin (Kenneth Griffith). They escape to France where Rossiter changes his name to Schüler. They meet a young girl named Nicole (Carla Challoner, then Yvonne Monlaur as an adult) scarred from WWII. Schüler performs plastic surgery on her, restores her face. When her father (Donald Pleasance) dies in an accident, Schüler takes over the circus that he ran.

What I've Caught Up With, October 2022

October is horror movie month, of course, which makes the non-horror movies I watched a little bit anomolous. I've already got a stock of reviews done for next year's 10-day review fiesta (horror movie month, after all), but I didn't just watch horror movies. I removed a bunch from the big list in October, and it was a bit of a mixed bag in terms of how I liked them.

Ten Days of Terror!: Shorts

Film: The House of the Devil (1896) (The Haunted Castle, Le Manoir du Diable); The Tell-Tale Heart (1953); Kitchen Sink
Format: Internet video on laptop.

I’ve been avoiding shorts on the horror movies list for no real reason other than aesthetic ones. Getting rid of shorts from the list makes it feel a little like cheating; wanting to watch 400 movies per year is a lot easier to accomplish when one of the movies is three minutes long. But it’s time to get through a few of them, and I started with the oldest film on the list, arguably the first-ever horror movie, Georges Melies’s The House of the Devil (otherwise called The Haunted Castle and Le Manoir du Diable).

With a running time of three minutes, we’re not going to get a great deal of plot in this one. That said, this was a long film for the time—this running time was considerable for what people were used to before the turn of the century. Most of the film is Melies learning what he is capable of doing with film. He’s experimenting with making things appear and disappear, something that would be used to astound and amaze people at the time and would be eventually used for both horror effects and comic effects by other directors. In that respect, this is sort of a one-trick pony. We’re going to get a lot of things popping in and out of existence or moving around from spot to spot on screen.

Ten Days of Terror!: Cry of the Banshee

Film: Cry of the Banshee
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

There’s a weird point in horror movie history where suddenly nudity became a part of the picture. There’s an even weirder point in the history of horror movies where nudity crept into classier side of the horror movie industry. I expect nudity when it comes to the seamier side of horror, but it’s for some reason always a little surprising to me when it shows up in something that stars Peter Cushing or Vincent Price. Enter Cry of the Banshee, a Vincent Price vehicle that takes place in Elizabethan England and confronts us with multiple instances of rape and forced nudity.

We’re going to start with magistrate Lord Edward Whitman (Price). We see him preside over a witch trial and condemn the girl to being stripped and whipped through the streets. Later, at a dinner, he brings in a girl and her brother, accuses them of witchcraft, and ends up killing them both. This brings out the ire of his second wife Patricia (Essy Persson), who leaves the party. Because we’re going to want to amp up the sleaze right away, Whitman’s son Sean (Stephan Chase) follows her and forces himself on her, his step-mother. And, because of when this was made, we’re going to see her not merely succumb to this, but accept it, because of course that’s going to happen.

Ten Days of Terror!: I Was a Teenage Werewolf

Film: I Was a Teenage Werewolf
Format: Internet video on Fire!

The phrase “I was a teenage ________” has a long and storied history as the punchline of plenty of jokes. It started with I Was a Teenage Werewolf and its companion film I Was a Teenage Frankenstein in 1957. Werewolf was also the movie that launched the career of Michael Landon just before he hit it really big with “Bonanza.” It’s also a movie that was clearly watched over and over by Paddy Chayefsky before he wrote “Altered States.”

There’s not a lot of mystery about what is going to happen here, right? We’re going to have a teenager named Tony Rivers (Landon) who is going to turn into a werewolf. There are going to be a lot of connections to other films (there’s a lot of Rebel Without a Cause in this, for starters) and there’s a lot of werewolf lore that it stays true to the legends and especially to The Wolf Man.