Matango!

From the director who brought you Godzilla, a tale of mushroom men.  A delirious addition to the pantheon of perambulating plant movies, (OK, I know that strictly speaking mushrooms are fungi, but that's close enough), this one eschews the problem of how those slow-moving walking plants ever catch their prey by having the threat come from within the victim.  That's right, within.  The mushroom people don't catch their victims, as such, instead they are their victims, in that the shipwreck survivors who foolishly eat the mushrooms on the island they find themselves marooned on, are then transformed into mushroom people.   Perhaps the most bizarre of all Japanese movie monsters from the fifties and sixties, Matango - Fungus of Terror (1963) - to give the film its UK title - sits alongside director Ishiro Honda's 1960 movie The Human Vapor as Japanese monster movies which make the monstrous threat internal, rather than the external threats posed by the likes of Godzilla and Rodan.

However, in common with the Godzilla films, the spectre of Hiroshima lurks in the background, with the mutant mushrooms apparently the result of radiation from nuclear tests.   A bizarre and wildly imaginative tale, Matango became something of a cult classic during the late sixties when AIP released it direct to American TV under the title Attack of the Mushroom People.  Despite the schlocky re-titling, Matango isn't simply another campy monster movie, instead dealing with far darker themes about human nature and the breakdown of social norms and behaviour when groups of people are isolated from wider society.  That said, it should also make you think twice next time you are tempted to try those 'magic mushrooms'...