Monster A-Go Go (1965)

 

Director: Bill Rebane (with Herschell Gordon Lewis)

Screenplay: Bill Rebane, Jeff Smith and Dok Stanford

Cast: Philip Morton as Col. Steve Connors; June Travis as Ruth Logan; George Perry as Dr. Brent; Lois Brooks as Nora Kramer; Rork Stevens as Tom Logan; Peter M. Thompson as Dr. Chris Manning; Robert Simons as Henry Schwartz; Barry Hopkins as Frank Logan; Henry Hite as Frank Douglas / the Monster; Herschell Gordon Lewis as the Radio Announcer Voice; Bill Rebane a  theBoyfriend at Dance / the Narrator

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) / An Abstract Candidate

 

What you are about to see may not even be possible, within the narrow limits of human understanding.

 

A surf guitar song set over the still shot of the cosmos is probably befitting Monster A-Go Go. Christened one of the worst films ever made, including a stint on Mystery Science Theatre 3000, its infamy in genre cinema is well known. The story of why this film ends up as peculiar as it can be is simple, yet asks so much of how precarious filmmaking actually is on any level. Bill Rebane, a figure who would go on in Wisconsin making genre films, shot the film in sections as he kept running out of money¹. The film was eventually unfinished, and it was Herschell Gordon Lewis, the man who I admire but was always a businessman as much as a favour for splatter flicks, who bought the unfinished material wishing to have a secondary film to play with one of his own. Lewis finished the original with all the issues, such as not being able to hire the original actors, which could come about as a result of this.

A fallen space spaceship and the astronaut named Frank meant to be within it are found crashed in a field. The astronaut is nowhere to be seen, but there is a dead helicopter pilot, which immediately raises concerns. Also be aware, as a viewer, the voice over narrator, to pad over of the loose ends, such as a still conversation to the wife of the astronaut, is going to be the MVP here whether you wish to bequeath the title to him or not. Played by original director Bill Rebane himself, that deserves applause because never was there pontification in a sci-fi narration with such heady tones, Criswell only beating him as no one could match Criswell in Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957).

As someone more sympathetic to these films, punching down on Monster A-Go-Go was not something I did throughout viewing this film. Someone else would punch down on little Jimmy, nephew of the astronaut Frank, who is the kind of kid put in front to act who hesitates on camera, who also looks like a stereotype of a fifties Americana young boy, who asks whether Jimmy was as common a name in North America as it inexplicitly has always felt like for myself. Others would punch down on long scenes of actors talking in fields. Far more an issue, whilst a compelling oddity, is that this film is incredibly dry and languid, with the monster normally not seen and just talked of. It can cut to go-go dancing in the most abrupt of inclusions, but unintentionally this is like if James Benning or an avant-garde artist decided to make a parody of a sixties sci-fi b-flick and deliberately wished to antagonise the conventional viewer of such films.

The use of the narrator to explain content, and the minimalist score alone, feels like we have accidentally made an avant-garde film at times, especially as for a low budget film mocked as terrible, when seen in a restored form, this is a monochrome independent production that, honestly, looks a higher budget than many modern no-budget films shot on digital. That is entirely because celluloid and even 16 millimetre film has a distinct touch to it, a layer of aesthetic which is striking, especially as for a Chicago shot film, this has moments which are atmospheric even if most of it is still scenes of a lot of exposition. When the monster is actually revealed, it is then you realise these experiments in obfuscation are really just a film that needed to be patched together, with the stranger caveat that the monster is not an alien, or a rug acquired because the original costume was lost, nor an Incredible Melting Man designed by Rick Baker, but Henry Hite, who is a distinct looking man, which cannot be denied, but you feel sympathy for in how awkwardly he is used. Born Henry Marion Mullens, Hite was promoted as "the world's tallest man" at 8 ft 2 in, even if his actual height was 7 ft 6¾ in², part of a Vaudeville act called the “Lowe, Hite and Stanley” show³. Monster A-Go Go was his only film, most of his career for various food promotions like Wilson Certified Meats³. Hite here, sadly, does not have a lot of time onscreen, unable to emphasis his height over everyone else and thus, usually in a shot separate, instead looking like a balding man in a mucky silver jump suit and burn makeup. With the added aspect that it is a film with almost all the monster attacks worked around off-screen, even if using his height for monstrousness can be argued to be distasteful, he is a distinct figure to include in any film which is not appreciated enough by the film itself.

It truly does feel like a minimalist take on a sci-fi monster film, including all the aspects not intended, as with a Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966) which would cause the likes of Mystery Science Theatre to urinate on it. It is, even for a film over just an hour, a film so languid that my younger self, not used to these extremes, would have despised it. Now, adapting to these types of films, there is something delightfully perverse in a lengthy scene of a man, wandering a film holding a burnt stick, set to clearly audible sound of the film reel in the preserved Arrow Film restoration, and bird calls. Lengthy scenes of exposition, around a narrative where the monster is abruptly kept at one point by a scientist only to escape again, have a theatre-like pace with sets, even a tangent that leads to no build up or anyone being quickly killed. It involves a trucking "Lancelot" helping a woman with a broken down car, with a kiss as a reward. Those characters do not return, no monster appears, and whilst I liked it, other viewers would be dumbfounded. This is not even taking in the casting of June Travis, in a tradition of hiring older actors based on their history, Travis an actress from the Hollywood studio system who whose career was mostly in thirties films with Monster A-Go Go her last. Her role, barring a possible romance with one of the men trying to find Frank, despite already being with Frank, is barely here as well and just adds to the strange jumble of pieces that made the film.

Bill Rebane, the director of the likes of The Giant Spider Invasion (1975), is someone I want to get into. He would not make another film for nine years after this¹, staying in short and industrial filmmaking until Invasion from Inner Earth (1974). Truthfully, Invasion from Inner Earth managed to be even more languid, a far more difficult film to sit through if still fascinating. Monster A-Go Go is undeniably a potential struggle for anyone getting into these films, but it is such a bizarre end result of when films are left unfinished and are attempted to be finished years later that I appreciated. It is as much a film meaningful for me as a huge Herschell Gordon Lewis fan, someone who would have openly admitted, as a businessman first, he made films with little and on the seat of his pants. By himself, he could make a film as strange as Something Weird (1967), which lived up to that title and even founded the company of the same name, by the late Mike Vraney and now held by his widow Lisa Petrucci, who would release Monster A-Go Go on unsuspecting viewers in a new age. This film is no different in the slightest to the fifties sci-fi from Hollywood, all as capable of being as rewarding as they are kitschy, all with a fixation on the dangers of radiation be it nuke or from space flight, with the only difference is that this is the anti-sci-fi film in structure. It also has as big an anti-climax transpiring as I have ever seen in these films, which was a surprise to see, in hindsight hilarious if the kind that would cement this film's infamy fully.  For those prepared for a film like Monster A-Go Go, the stomach for it, it is fascinating to witness as this anti-climatic, anti-genre mishap, especially with the delight that, thankfully, Bill Rebane kept making films and a cult name for himself from the seventies onwards, and Herschell Gordon Lewis made a lot of films at this time in a variety of genres, and became a cult legend with this a weird footnote for him.

Abstract Spectrum: Minimalist/Psychotronic

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

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1) This is discussed by Rebane himself on part one of the Straight Shooter interviews, included with Arrow Video's Weird Wisconsin: The Bill Rebane Collection

2) Taken from "Tall Man Henry Hite Dead At 63", published in The Evening Independent on May 29th 1978.

3) Taken from Strange But True: When the 'World's Tallest Man' came to Clinton, written by Terrance Ingano for Telegran & Gazette, included on the site for July 11th 2021.