From the imagination of Ishiro Honda, the man who made Godzilla and most of its succeeding kaiju films, comes one of the weirdest films I have ever seen. Unlike Honda’s other films, this is no giant monster movie. Matango, or Attack of the Mushroom People, is a lysergic-drenched, doom-laden allegory made in a brief break between two of Honda’s more characteristic monster movies, King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962) and Godzilla vs. Mothra (1964). Despite its name, the mushroom people fail to make an appearance until the last 20-or-so minutes of the film, while the rest of the film is spent watching the seven main characters, all spoiled members of the Japanese social elite, bicker.
The film begins as these seven sexist men and their travelling companions (one of which is a proud prostitute-type companion), take their new yacht for a spin. A fierce storm strands them on a fog-enshrouded, seemingly-uninhabited island, where nothing lives except for a species of giant, toxic, gross-looking fungus called “matango”. Professor Murai (Akira Kubo) warns his friends not to eat the mushrooms, as their effects are unknown but certainly dangerous. The gang stumbles upon another wrecked ship, seemingly some sort of nuclear research ship, and take shelter there. The women are the first to notice that there are no mirrors on board the deserted ship. The discovery of the ship's log sheds some light on the mystery, warning of the giant fungi's damaging effect on the human nervous tissue, as does the appearance of a green slimy mutated mushroom man at one of the portholes, but by this stage it is too late as the passengers, low on food rations and any sympathetic characteristics, descend into paranoia and psychosis under the influence of the hallucinogenic fungus.
On one hand, Honda magnificently portrays the way in which the rapid economic growth of Japan has resulted in a population divorced from cultural and natural origins. The hierarchy of man above all other life — with fungi at its very base — is revealed to be merely illusionary and crumbles the further the ship drifts. Carried away by the forces of nature on a freak ocean tide, the film's irreversible conclusion is that of evolution turning full circle; man becomes mushroom as he reverts back to the primordial sludge. On the other hand, the film makes less sense the longer you think about it. Why did the skipper jump overboard when he had what should have been 40 days of food with him? It is also undeniably sexist, with one sunglass-wearing man sneaking into the women’s bedroom deep into the night, his intentions obviously implied to be treacherous. Not one character is really at all redeemable or likeable — even the skipper, the only non-privileged member of the group and who seems to be nice enough to begin with, abandons the group to run away on his own, and ends up dying.
Also blatant is the drug metaphor, saturated within the entire look of Matango, from the vivid colour palette to the surreal landscapes and forests lush with bulbous mushrooms. At one point psilocybin is mentioned explicitly (used by one of the unsympathetic men to justify his actions), and the scenes in which the characters break down into jittery paranoid wrecks, staring unflinchingly at objects six inches away from their noses or threatening to kill one another are even more unambiguous in the metaphor. It is also worth mentioning that Japan was (and in some capacity still is) one of the few countries where psilocybin, also known as Magic Mushrooms, is legally available. The pace of this undeniably trippy imagery continually escalates until it reaches full-blown psychedelia, with hallucinatory flashbacks of the Tokyo skyline superimposed over dancing girls as the characters descend into complete delirium, complemented by the use of bright neon colors. As the mushrooms begin taking over the whole island, and the mutated remains of the crew of the previous wreck close in, a complete drug-induced assimilation into the environment seems to be the only solution, a complete return to nature.
While the mushroom costumes are undeniably goofy, the atmosphere Honda crafts around the silly costumes actually gives them an eerie, skin-crawling quality. The mushrooms laugh: a haunting, echoing, disembodied laughter, accompanied by images of the characters who have eaten the mushrooms gradually mutating, spores sprouting up all over their bodies. Somehow, the shoddy makeup does not hinder the sense of disgust and fear that the mutated characters inspire.
Given the time it was made, Matango has some remarkably pessimistic, apocalyptic subtext. It stands apart from other Japanese films of the time, especially those made by Toho and Honda, in this respect. As the ship's sole survivor gazes through the bars of his asylum window onto the jumbled skyline, having finished recounting his story to the doctors huddled outside his cell, he weighs the pros and cons of returning to the drugged bliss of the island with the girl he left behind, or forging a new life within the pulsing neon of modern Tokyo.