Seven hard-partying jet-setters run into trouble when their yacht is disabled in a storm. After floating aimlessly for days, they wash up on a deserted island far south of Japan. While looking for food and water, they discover the rotting shell of a derelict ship on the beach. It’s covered in a weird mold and is missing all its mirrors, but they do find some food inside and after scrubbing down the decks the castaways decide to move in.
The supplies from the ship doesn’t last long and food is scarce on the island, forcing the castaways to spend most of their time foraging for wild potatoes and digging for clams and turtle eggs. Strangely, the island seems bereft of all non-aquatic animal life and even the birds won’t land there. Before long, the castaways start seeing strange things moving in the jungle, and then eventually on the ship itself. Ultimately they learn that the ship’s missing crew have not exactly left the island yet -- and that unless they find a way off the island they are likely to share their fate as well.
Is it any good?
MATANGO is a surprisingly slow movie -- it’s twenty minutes until the castaways even land on the island, and a good forty-five until anything seemingly out of the ordinary happens. Even once the science fiction elements start asserting themselves, MATANGO still doggedly sticks with the human side of the story -- leaving the monsters mostly (but thankfully not entirely) in the shadows. Though not exactly dull, the movie consequently feels pretty draggy in places. But, on the other hand, the restraint of the first eighty-five minutes makes it all the more trippy when it finally pulls out all the stops at the very end.
For the most part, the cast and the script are not really good enough to make the human focus as riveting as it otherwise might be. But the characters do make the situation at least somewhat interesting. They’re selfish and petty people, and most are perfectly will to steal food for themselves, extort a profit from the situation, or use violence to get what they want. Another interesting element is that the island does abound in one particular kind of food: mushrooms. But log books from the derelict ship seem to indicate that the mushrooms are toxic in a peculiar (but non-fatal) way, and as starving characters resort one-by-one to eating the mushrooms they are ostracized from the group as though they have become toxic themselves.
Like a lot of other sci-fi and horror movies about island castaways, MATANGO is not really interested in what it takes to survive on an uninhabited island. The island is simply an excuse to strand the characters alone someplace where weird things can happen in a way that may or may not double as commentary on contemporary society. Some of the weird things -- like the moldy abandoned ship -- are really pretty neat. The long sequence where the castaways explore the derelict and search it for useful items is probably the best part of the movie. (Except, perhaps, the wild and crazy final five minutes.) There are also two neat bookend segments at the very beginning and very end where one of the survivors recalls the story in a Tokyo that looks as weird as any alien city.
It’s also very easy to read the mushrooms as a societal metaphor. The obvious parallel would be something to do with drugs, but there are a couple of scenes where they are pretty clearly linked with sex instead. The conclusions are not exactly the same ones that most horror movies seemingly arrive at, but when all is said and done MATANGO still doesn’t leave you with too much to think about it. Any metaphorical level is strictly a slight added bonus, rather than a major theme.
THIS SOUNDS AWESOME
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