Even allowing for its torturous production history and notable lack of resources, Monster A-Go-Go is still a thumpingly awful, but mercifully short, film riddled with technical errors, glacially paced and more dull than any film about giant, radioactive astronauts and go-go dancing has any right to be.
The plot apes that of Val Guest’s far, far better The Quatermass Xperiment (1955). Two cops sitting in a car in the middle of nowhere and a helicopter pilot that land his aircraft nearby (one suspects that most of the budget went on hiring a Bell 47H) are alerted to the crash-landing of a space capsule. When the cops arrive at the scene they find the body of the pilot dead, burned to a crisp and the astronaut, Frank Douglas is missing. He later turns up as a radiation-scarred monster (played by 7 foot 6 inch tall Henry Hite, a former vaudevillian and sometime poster boy for Corn King tinned corn) to menace some teenagers. He’s briefly captured and imprisoned by scientists but escapes (unseen by the audience – we just have to take the narrator’s word for it) and goes on a rampage that only stops when his pursuers receive a message telling them that Douglas is in fact alive and has been rescued from the North Atlantic. “As if a switch had been turned,” the narrator intones, “as if an eye had been blinked, as if some phantom force in the universe had made a move eons beyond our comprehension, suddenly, there was no trail! There was no giant, no monster, no thing called “Douglas” to be followed.” And then it ends.
Monster A-Go Go had started life in 1961 as Terror at Halfday under the direction of Wisconsin auteur Bill Rebane (Invasion from Inner Earth (1974), The Giant Spider Invasion (1975), The Alpha Incident (1978), The Capture of Bigfoot (1979) et al). It should have been his debut film but he ran out of money and the film was abandoned, unfinished, until Summer 1963 when, according to Variety, Rebane partnered with Dok Sanford of RPM Productions to resume work. That iteration of the film also seemed to fall by the wayside for another year until what was left of it was picked up by Herschell Gordon Lewis who was in search of a co-feature for his latest, Moonshine Mountain (1964).
Lewis shot some new scenes and added a narration (variously credited to both Lewis and Rebane) that he hoped would hold it altogether. It’s not always easy to tell which bits of the film are his and which are Rebane’s but you do notice that a lot of the original cast suddenly disappear without explanation halfway through. Talking to Fangoria in 1996, Rebane noted that “when I finally saw the picture I hardly recognised it. All that was left was some of the original bad acting from the scientists that I shot. Herschell added the rock music, the narration and all of the scenes of the monster attacking the girls.”
So it can’t be that much of a surprise that the resulting monstrosity was such a mess. Ed Wood is routinely trotted out as the world’s worst film director and there are some similarities between his work and Monster A-Go Go, though the Rebane/Lewis farrago lacks the accidental charm of something like Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959). The narration is full of the sort of inane observations you’d expect from Wood regular Criswell (“The line between science fiction and science fact is microscopically thin”) and the film’s technical shortcomings are so painful even Wood himself might have sneered at them. Dialogue in outdoor scenes has a strange recorded-in-a-tiny-room echo, continuity is barely maintained from one shot to the next let alone between scenes and the plot is a barely coherent mess.
Static scenes that often have very little to do the rest of the film lumber on far longer than they need to as stranded actors (uniformly awful) wait in vain for an editor to relieve them of their awkward hanging about waiting for something to happen or for Rebane/Lewis simply to call “cut” and the ending is so abrupt and laughable that one suspects that Lewis simply got fed up trying to make this turkey fly and opted for a swift mercy killing.
You’ll have to go a very long way to find a film as inept and as boring as Monster A-Go Go. Even the most ardent admirers of so-bad-it’s-good cinema have little good to say about this one. Lewis, who was often playfully self-deprecating about his own work, sold the film with the poster tags “the picture that comes complete with a 10-foot tall monster, to give you the wim-wams!” and “an astronaut went up – a “guess-what” came down!” suggesting that he wasn’t taking it terribly seriously. Not that it helps. It’s only going to waste 68 minutes of your life but by the time you reach that terrible, head-scratching finale it it’ll feel like a lot more…
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