Monster-A-Go-Go

Gone Ghoul

Monster-A-Go-Go
USA 1965 Directed by Bill Rebane
(with additional footage by Herchell Gordon Lewis)
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Monster-A-Go-Go is the first film in a Blu Ray box set from Arrow called Weird Wisconsin - The Bill Rebane Collection. I’ve already talked about Rebane in my review of the feature length documentary which also comes as part of this set (reviewed here) and I have to say that, while I wasn’t expecting much from the film, it comes over as a lot less interesting than I was expecting. Bill Rebane himself has called this the worst movie ever made but I think he’s maybe being a little hard on himself... he’s obviously never had to sit through Eddie Murphy in Harlem Nights.

The brief plot of the film is actually a little like Nigel Kneale’s The Quatermass Experiment (and subsequent film adaptation reviewed here) but, you know, without any marked quality or dramatic impetus to the story. A basic summary would be that an astronaut who has somehow grown to enormous size arrives on Earth when his capsule returns but he is missing, strangling people and accidentally killing them with his lethal space radiation. As the film progresses, his space radiation gets bigger in an ever increasing radius around him until it threatens to engulf a city. Then he disappears and turns up well, with no radiation and at normal size. And that’s it... and as much as that plot summary sounds like it might be ‘so bad it’s good’... it’s not. It’s just so bad it’s incompetent most of the time.

Okay so, Rebane’s first attempt at film making was certainly a learning curve. He decided to shoot the film, then called Terror At Halfday, in order of the scenes (rather than the sensible way) and he ran out of money after a few days. When he eventually raised enough money again to resume filming, most of the actors were unavailable... which explains why most of the characters just disappear after the first 20 to 30 minutes into the movie, to be replaced with new characters fulfilling the same functions. Apart from one actor who played a character who had already died. He was available so he just takes his wig off, wears glasses and returns as his own character’s twin brother, who is also a scientist.

Then filming halted again with the movie still incomplete and pretty much abandoned. Four years later, Rebane’s friend, the Godfather Of Gore Herschell Gordon Lewis, needed a second feature to play with one of his cheaply made movies. So he bought the film and added a few more scenes with different characters (random sequences of dancing and people running away from the ‘space mutant’s point of view’ character), added his own narration to try and fill in all the gaps and, you know, actually tried to convey to the audience what is actually going on... where he really is trying very hard to sound like Rod Serling introducing and narrating an episode of The Twilight Zone... and released it with a new title, Monster-A-Go-Go.

And, yeah, it’s cheap and not particularly cheerful.

The man playing the astronaut Frank was a natural giant... very tall indeed and so he was perfect for the role. Except you never see him in long shot interacting with anyone else so you can’t actually see how tall he is. He’s only in the film maybe a total of two minutes, scattered in various quick shots throughout the narrative and, sometimes he has papier-mâché on his face to show his mutation and, sometimes he hasn’t and they just forgot. Most of the things he gets up to take place off camera, presumably because it’s cheap (although I understand that approach is a Bill Rebane signature so, I’ll reserve judgement for now) and so things like the death of a helicopter pilot are heard through a policeman’s radio, as he is in touch with them. So... “My god....eaaaaaggghhhhh”, for example. The voice over narrative tells the audience that his body is “horribly mangled in a way no one had seen before.” When we do get a quick look at an actor standing in (err... laying down) for the dead pilot a little later, no mangling seems present.

Some of the edits are so badly done that I can only assume  a lot of the shots required weren’t covered on the shoot. This creates moments when it just looks like the film broke and the actors are just a little later into the same performance. And the sound is terrible as all the ambient noise is captured on the microphones. And there’s no music in the film apart from a song on the credits and at a night club... so there’s nothing to help mask the inadequacies of the sound. Indeed, in one sequence, instead of being able to dub on the sound of a phone ringing, someone just makes a brrrr brrrr phone noise off camera and this is as good a stand in as they can afford.

And, like I said, at the end the mystery just disappears into the ether and we are told by Herschel’s pseudo-Serling voice-over, because obviously we’re not going to see it, that everything is back to normal and everyone just turned out fine. It’s an ending as terrible as the rest of the movie, to be sure.

But what is interesting is... some of the characters just don’t seem to get along and they go about their daily duties giving the impression that they are barely able to disguise their contempt of each other. I don’t know for sure but I’m interested in finding out if this passive hostility in the characters crops up again in Rebane’s work. I guess I’ll know soon enough... there are five more of his movies in this set from Arrow for me still to watch. As for Monster-A-Go-Go... can’t say I’d recommend it to anyone but I may find later that it’s a very telling starting point for this independent director’s career.