Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

As Good As It Gets

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

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? The answer is that ATTACK OF THE MUSHROOM PEOPLE (the US television title) is a loose adaptation of Hodgson's short story, The Voice in the Night. The latter is one of my favourites and I looked forward to seeing it put on screen, but only the basic premise remains the same.ATTACK OF THE MUSHROOM PEOPLE is very much a product of the '60s. The cast all have stock roles: there's a psychiatrist (very much in vogue during this period), a novelist, some thrill-seekers and a stern skipper. The main problem with this film is that absolutely NONE of the characters are engaging. They're all unlikable, and you end up hoping that they're going to get bumped off as quickly as possible. Not so. This is one of those films that saves up the (admittedly good) action for the last ten minutes. Until then we've got scene after scene of dialogue, some exposition in the form of flashbacks here and there, and most of all, just plain mood building.How can a film about people turning into mushrooms be so slow? Because the film-makers adopt a subtle approach rather than going for a fun, fast-paced B-picture. Subtlety and slow-burn are great in modern horror flicks like JU-ON: THE GRUDGE, but I wasn't expecting the approach in a '60s monster flick, which is why I disliked this film when I first saw it.Things have changed on a second viewing. There is some atmosphere present, and some good creepy scenes involving the mushrooms and what they do to people (the film got into trouble because the make-up resembled Hiroshima victims!). The ending is an all-out cheese fest and a lot of fun. Of course, this is the '60s, and these mushrooms are hallucinogenic, so there are plenty of psychedelic bits and some good old flashing coloured lights thrown into the mix. People are stranded, people bicker, people kill each other, people fall victim to monsters. When those people are uniformly uninteresting, it's hard to care about their fate. Still, this was a nice break for Honda from making movies about rubber-suited giant creatures.

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! After all, when I was a kid, it was marketed as "Attack of the Mushroom People".The first 90% of the film is pretty good and is highly reminiscent of "Lord of the Flies". A group of people are on a sailboat but are nearly lost in a storm. Being blown way off course and having a broken shortwave radio, it looks pretty tough for them. It's even worse when they finally find land but it turns out to be an island that seems to have little food--just lots and lots of mushrooms and fungi. To make things worse, if they eat the mushrooms, they are doomed to turn into mushroom people--though the film never adequately explained how they knew this to be the case or that they shouldn't eat the mushrooms but they tried eating practically everything else! What I liked about this aspect of the film is that the people began acting like animals due to the food shortage. Seemingly decent people began scheming and killing and it revealed some excellent insights into the dark side of human nature.However, the last few minutes of the film consisted of the mushroom monsters mucking about and this was incredibly silly. Still, despite this, the very end of the film did have a nice conclusion and the idea wasn't bad--until the mushroom monsters appeared!

This movie rocked when i was a kid (30 years ago) and still rocks today. I need to point out something that is very important. The translators took an unbelievable amount of license, so much that they in fact, changed the end of the movie. The version I had grown up with as a child, dubbed in English, has the main character yelling "I ATE THEM" and then revealing that he too has turned into a mushroom. I watched the Japanese version with English subtitles (no English dubbing)the other day, and the Japanese version has the main character claiming that he NEVER ate mushrooms but turned into one anyways. This true ending relates to the main point that the movie is trying to make, that society is deteriorating and that you don't have to "eat the mushrooms" to become one. I.E. the world is going to hell and even if you aren't to blame directly, you still face the consequences. It was so disappointing to think that the translators really messed it up. (or thought American audiences couldn't grasp such a concept). Anyways, a top movie with either ending.

Now this was quite a pleasant surprise. If you read the title, "Matango:Attack of the Mushroom People", the idea of a film legitimately creeping you out with it's "under the skin" effectiveness probably wasn't as expected as a cheesy monster movie. This film's premise is simple..a group of Japanese friends are on a yachting trip when their boat is viciously damaged by a major storm. They find, through a heavy fog, this island which has no known forms of life except growing mushrooms thereabouts and a massive derelict oceanographic ship overcome by moss and rot. There are some food rations and booze within that derelict ship, but a couple of the group steal more than their share. Soon, the relationships of these unfortunate souls deteriorate as hunger, jealousy, fear, and insanity overcome them. But, the deck becomes even more stacked when, one by one, each individual succumbs to the delicious mushrooms nearby the derelict and face the horrifying fact that in doing so, like a plague, their human bodies become ravaged internally which soon shows externally..they, like others whose ships were caught in the current that affected our protagonists stranding them on the island, steadily grow into mushroom people! The final climax as our hero, the professor, is trying to escape the clutches of these mushroom monstrosities(..the sound effects of echoing sinister laughter is eerie)after his love-interest, a weak school clerk, is trapped within the lair of these creatures, is quite unsettling.Along with "Gojira", this has to be considered director Ishirô Honda's finest hour..he creates this incredibly disturbing experience that is hard to shake. I tried just to imagine the terrifying ordeal that would be if I were in that professor's shoes, trying to forge his way through the scary mushroom monsters closing in from every corner. I think the film, besides the mushroom monsters that rear their ugly heads at the end, works well at building the suspense thanks to this practically hopeless situation the characters find themselves in..coupling that hopeless situation with a growing mistrust, anger & hidden feelings which come up to the surface away from their civilized world of modern Tokyo, as tension becomes so thick you can cut it with a knife and tempers flare quite often as pressure for survival squeezes them dry.