MonsterAGoGo

Monster A Go Go (1965)

NASA sends an astronaut into space. When he returns he is a mutated 10-foot tall monster that kills people with his radioactivity. The military tries to capture him, but fails to. Then they find out that one of the scientists had caught him and hid him in the lab. He gives him an antidote, which makes him better for a while until he breaks out and goes all “monster” again. Then he is chased again until he disappears into thin air. The men chasing him then gets a telegraph saying the mutated astronaut has been recovered from the ocean thousands of miles away. The narrator goes on about science and science fiction while I wondered what just happened to the last hour or so of my life.

I won’t say this is the worst movie that I’ve ever seen. This is because I enjoy bad movies and there is nothing about Monster A Go Go that I enjoyed at all. The plot is paper-thin and is completely devoid of anything interesting at all. I could mention the plot holes, but then that would be giving the movie credit for having a cohesive plot that you can follow, which it doesn’t. This movie was started by director Bill Rebane in the early sixties and then purchased and “finished” by H.G. Lewis a few years later to fill the bottom half of a double feature. So in addition to having very little plot much of the cast just disappears partway thru the movie as the new footage was added in to fill out the runtime. Not only that but Lewis uses one of my most hated plot devices, the voiceover, to try in vain to make something out of the footage he purchased and what he shot. Now I’m not bashing on Lewis, because I’m pretty damn sure he didn’t have much to work with. But then again he is the guy that tried to sell tickets to this mess so he isn’t blameless.

To go along with the bad acting, and nonexistent plot is a really poorly put together movie. The whole film suffers from bouts of terrible dubbing and when not dubbed some of the lousiest audio recording I’ve ever heard. Really some of the lines are completely unintelligible, which makes me wonder why they just didn’t dub the whole damn thing. The camera work is also bad and the lighting is even worse. Look for the shadows behind the actors in almost every indoor scene. Finally the monster is hardly ever seen on screen. When we do finally see him it looks like someone threw a dog turd on a guys face.

Don’t ever watch this movie. There is nothing good or charming about how bad this sucker is. This is coming from one of the few diehard Bill Rebane fans that you will find. This was the last of his movies that I hadn’t seen and I’ve been putting it off for a couple of years now. I should have waited a few more years.

0 out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer