The Manster (1959)

directed by George P. Breakston, Kenneth G. Crane

United States/Japan

72 minutes

3 stars out of 5

----

TEMPLE PRIEST SLAIN BY FIEND!

I had not heard of this until I read about it in Stuart Galbraith's Monsters Are Attacking Tokyo!, and I was intrigued because American sci-fi/horror movies from the '50s and Japanese monster movies are basically my two favorite things. How could a movie that combines the two exist without being more widely known?

This was a Japanese-American co-production, shot in Japan, and actually released a full three years earlier there than it was in the States. Reception seems to have been lukewarm at the time of release, and continues to be lukewarm today; for once, I'm not going to be a dissenting voice about that. This isn't a spectacular movie. It's fun, but no great shakes, especially if you've already seen a lot from either contributing country's monster film back catalogue. I looked into director Breakston's previous works, and... I'm not going to be exploring him any further, to say the least. The other guy was at least partially to blame for the Americanized version of Half Human so he's verboten too as far as I'm concerned.

The main character of the film is a foreign correspondent, Larry Stanford, working in Tokyo but about to return to the US. His last job is to interview a scientist named Dr. Suzuki in his lab way up in the mountains (something about the aesthetic of a hidden laboratory in such a rural setting was really cool to me), but once he gets there, Suzuki starts asking him some strange questions... questions, say, that one might ask if one was planning to turn one's conversational partner into a manster. The scientist drugs our hapless protagonist and injects him with a mystery solution that slowly but surely starts mutating him into something more than human. We see the previous results of whatever was in that needle in the form of Suzuki's wife and son, both locked up in his basement after their transformation into terrible, incoherent creatures. Why exactly Stanford was meant to turn out better than the previous two attempts is not entirely clear to me, but by the end Suzuki realizes his mistake.

It's pretty standard schlocky fare. The main problem I had with this was that it's got too much "man" and not enough "-ster". Once Stanford's transformation ramps up, things start getting interesting, but for a 72-minute movie, there's a lot of time spent on Stanford's infidelities and other human woes. I'm also not sure if his sudden turn towards drink and women when he'd previously described himself as a "good boy" was some kind of side-effect of the mystery serum, but we spend a good deal of time watching this guy running himself into the ground before we get to see any monster stuff. In my opinion, this movie picks up once more characters enter the scene: various policemen, Stanford's boss, his wife, and numerous eyewitnesses and unfortunate victims serve to flesh out what had, until then, been a pretty boring cast. It's also fun to see Tetsu Nakamura, who I recognized as one of the goons from Mothra, in a substantial, non-goon role, but he's not in it enough to really carry the film; the task is instead allotted to our somewhat less-than-capable protagonist.

Special effects were handled by Shinpei Takagi, which is... weird, considering this is the only time in his entire career that he did special effects (he was an actor, and also played the doomed priest in this film). The transformation sequence is very choppy and jumps jarringly from one stage to the next; technology at the time was, of course, not at a point where a true, real-time transformation could be shown, but I still feel like there could have been some in-between with regards to how quickly Stanford starts mutating. I will say one of the best scenes in the whole film is when Stanford, messy drunk and alone, tears off his shirt to reveal a fully-formed eye on his shoulder. That's a kind of gross that I wasn't expecting from this. Otherwise, the effects are alright. If I could have found a print of this in better than total garbage quality, I might have appreciated them more.

Recommended mostly for monster movie fans and dedicated ones at that.