We start here: Seven passengers on a yacht.  There’s the millionaire who owns it, his hired skipper, and the weirdo first mate.  Their passengers include a sexy starlet, a virginal country girl, and a professor.  The ship encounters a terrible storm, and the travelers are soon shipwrecked on a Pacific island with no hope of rescue.  And that’s when things start to get interesting.

I could be talking about GILLIGAN’S ISLAND, the amiably stupid CBS sitcom (1964-1967).  But as it happens I’m talking about the 1963 Japanese horror flick MATANGO.

When I first introduced MATANGO to some friends recently (“Lou and Harriet, meet MATANGO.  MATANGO, this is Lou and Harriet.”), they couldn’t stop noticing the exhaustive parallels to GILLIGAN’S ISLAND.  “I can just imagine Sherwood Schwartz going, “I’ll do something like that, but with more jokes and fewer monsters!”  The thing is, despite the palpable similarities, it’s a tough case to say the similarities are anything but coincidental.  Weirdly, unnervingly, coincidental.

I won’t spend too much time here talking about GILLIGAN’S ISLAND.  I’ve looked at the stats for TCM’s web sites and I know that you, gentle reader, are most likely my age—and I grew up watching GILLIGAN’S ISLAND on perpetual reruns.  We can take that one as read, shall we?

But I do need to introduce MATANGO (“Morlocks readers, meet MATANGO.  MATANGO, these are the Morlocks readers.”)

When it came out in Japan in 1963 (one year before GILLIGAN), it was greeted with resounding, enthusiastic disinterest.  Audiences stayed away in droves.  It was a categorical flop if ever there was one.  AIP picked up the US TV rights and syndicated it as ATTACK OF THE MUSHROOM PEOPLE starting in 1965 (one year after GILLIGAN).  Of the half dozen or so Americans who caught it on its 1960s TV rotation, MUSHROOM PEOPLE enthralled them.  Smitten by this nutty little movie, they carried the torch—and over time this accrued to a modest cult reputation.

Thanks to that cult-movie street cred, MATANGO has been rescued from its temporary exile and rehabilitated on DVD.  I’d venture to say it has more fans and a higher pop culture profile today than ever before.  Which is to say, it’s a long shot Sherwood Schwartz ever saw this.  And I do mean ever.

Stylistically and thematically these two don’t have much in common.  The connection is visual—in those images of the castaways, in that pairing of the Professor and Mary Ann.  But MATANGO is a very different kind of entertainment.  I mean, it’s a very different kind of entertainment.

Now, let’s pause here for a second to clarify something:

The makers of MATANGO weren’t in the habit of making flops.  Tomoyuki Tanaka (producer), Ishiro Honda (director), Eiji Tsuburaya (special effects guru)—these were the guys behind GODZILLA and the entire franchise of Toho’s populist fantasy films.  They’d built a veritable money-factory for Toho—except for MATANGO.  What was different this time?

Tonally, this thing isn’t of a piece with those other Toho spectacles.  No giant monsters.  No humor.  Just a grim fable, which unfolds patiently.

The shipwrecked survivors have washed ashore on an island with virtually nothing to eat.  There’s no indigenous wildlife (birds avoid the place) and the only remotely edible plant is a bitter root that doesn’t even grow in enough quantity to qualify as a meal.

The usual social dynamics start to tear at the group: rich vs poor, athletic survivalist vs reedy intellectual, horny men vs outnumbered women.  All this plays out against a backdrop of crippling starvation.

Ah, but there’s a catch—the island is overrun with ginormous mushrooms, irradiated by H-bomb tests (natch).  Apparently, if you eat the ‘shrooms, you won’t starve—but you will mutate into a mushroom person (hence the English title).  Which would you rather do—starve to death, or become an inhuman fungoid thing?  If those are your only two choices, would you opt to survive, even if survival meant giving up who you were?

It isn’t hard to see this as a parable of selling out.

Ishiro Honda had been Akira Kurosawa’s neighbor, friend, and co-director.  In the late 1940s Honda is directing second-unit stuff for STRAY DOG.  In the 1950s he’s helming some of Toho’s biggest money-makers—serious dramas about war and bravery and the human spirit.  And then, in 1954, he makes GODZILLA and his destiny is forever changed.  No more arty dramas for you, Honda-san—you’re gonna spend the rest of your life making movies about guys in rubber suits hitting each other.  Did Honda ever regret this course change?  Did he ever wonder what his life and career might have been, without Godzilla?

Screenwriter Takeshi Kimura was rather blunt about his unhappiness at being relegated to making monster movies.  He complained about it constantly—and when his displeasure reached high water marks, he’d adopt the pen name “Kaoro Mabuchi” to avoid having to sign his name to some of the silly stuff he was obliged to do.

This was the genius of MATANGO—a vehicle by which Honda and Kimura could vent some of their frustration about monster movies in the form of a monster movie.  It’s about the price of survival—about how the last man standing won’t be the man he was.

I don’t want to spoil MATANGO for you if you haven’t seen it, but there’s one last point here I want to make that requires me to reveal certain secrets.  So, if you’d prefer to preserve your innocence, just call it a day and go find some internet pictures of cats.

{spoiler buffer zone}

The sell-out parable has an extra wrinkle, or maybe even two.  I first saw the American TV version ATTACK OF THE MUSHROOM PEOPLE, and here’s how it ends:

Spoiler-English

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To sum it up for those of you who skipped the clip, its final twist reveals that the Akira Kubo character has returned to mainland Japan, but is mutating into a Matango.  His final line says that he couldn’t resist the temptation and ultimately ate the mushrooms–but only after he had already lost his girlfriend.  He stood on principle just long enough to suffer the consequences, and then caved in just enough to reap only the consequences.  It’s the worst of both worlds.

He might as well have stayed with her.  He stood on principle, and then compromised his principles.  It’s a devastating conclusion—and one with a keen insight into human nature.

The original Japanese version has identical footage but a different closing line–here it is:

Spoiler-Japanese

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The difference is just one line, but it changes the nature of the twist.  This time, Akira Kubo reveals that he’s mutating even though he never ate the mushroom.  They’d misread the nature of the problem–the mutation wasn’t a result of eating the matango, but because everyone on the island gave in to temptation nobody ever had access to the control group data to confirm that.

As in the English version, he lost his girlfriend for nothing—he might as well have stayed with her.

Both versions have the same basic thrust—you’re going to suffer the consequences anyway, no matter what you do.  I’m not even sure which version I think is more horrifying.