Matango (1963)

Directed by: Ishirô Honda

Writers: Takeshi Kimura, Shinichi Hoshi, Masami Fukushima, William Hope Hodgson (story “The Voice in the Night”)

 

Now I’m going to spoil this movie for you, so if you plan to see it for the first time (which I seriously DON’T recommend), then get lost. Spoilers starting from the next paragraph.

OK, then: Some Japanese people find themselves on a mysterious island after a shipwreck or something and they turn into mushrooms. End. Not much of a story, as you can see, but the bigger problem is that the movie hardly contains much of anything. First we are treated with a really long and boring boat sequence where we get introduced to a bunch of completely uninteresting characters, followed by a really long and boring sequence of island exploring, where we find out that something is very very wrong there. After that, there’s a really long and boring obligatory sequence where those unmemorable characters fight each other for some reason and then, finally, there’s a short (but equally boring) part where they turn into mushrooms.

This kind of body horror could have a great potential, but this movie is never scary or disturbing. If anything, it’s just psychedelic (particularly near the end). If you’re going to turn into mushroom, you have to have your body slowly disfigured over time, with numerous disturbing discoveries (“Hey, what is this stem doing over my left eye? Haven’t noticed it before!”), but in this movie we just notice that people occasionally go missing and later see some really large mushrooms (or, rather, collections of mushrooms) and we have to conclude it’s them. Well, screw that! Someone should hire Yoshihiro Nishimura to remake this.

The Ice Pirates (1984)

Directed by: Stuart Raffill

Writers: Stuart Raffill, Stanford Sherman

Some movies are hard to describe, because their quality doesn’t lie in any particular segment that you can analyze, measure and put on paper (or screen). If I had to describe why this movie, without a shadow of a doubt, absolutely rules, I’d simply say – it has SOUL. And if that’s not enough for you, then go watch Lars von Trier or something and leave me alone.

Okay, let me elaborate this just a little bit: The Ice Pirates is a wacky space adventure with enormous quantity of... stuff. Stuff that happens, I mean. You have people dressed as pirates, swordfighting (for no apparent reason, powerful futuristic weapons are rarely used!), cheap sex jokes (so cheap, in fact, that they work), talking severed head, a frog woman, main music theme that’s an obvious rip-off of the Star Trek theme, Mad Max-like desert car chases, random alien parasites, unicorns, eunuchs, Templars, politically incorrect (without being offensive!) racial jokes that you’d never see in a today’s movie etc. etc. etc.

Of course, all this would have been a horrible mess if it weren’t for the glue to, well, glue it all together. And in this case, I’d say that glue are the surprisingly likeable characters, especially the main hero (Mel Brooks, take note!), played by Robert Urich, who really nails it down. He reminds me of John Terlesky in Jim Wynorski’s Deathstalker II, or, if you want a more mainstream comparison – Bruce Campbell’s Ash from the Evil Dead series. Take for example an otherwise amazing film like Spaceballs, being slightly less amazing than it could have been, due to Bill Pullman’s uninspired performance. Exactly the opposite happens here.

The main hero’s space crew is also great and it includes Anjelica Huston and Ron Perlman. So it’s really great to watch this characters going from one adventure into another, being completely aware of the tongue-in-cheek nature of the film. Although its inspirations are obvious (Star Trek, Star Wars, old pirate movies, to name a few), The Ice Pirates is not a direct parody of any particular movie or genre. It doesn’t try to pack jokes into every single frame, it lets itself breathe (so to speak) so it will never make you tired – and when something works (and that’s very often), it really does WORK!

 

My favorites here are the running joke with malfunctioning robots and an absolutely hilarious fight sequence near the end, where everyone ages rapidly during some weird time-space phenomenon. I allmost fell on the floor laughing during this one. Add to all this the special effects and set design that are way above the movie’s low budget and you have a clear winner. I know tastes are different, but if you don’t like The Ice Pirates, something is wrong with you and you need to see a psychiatrist.