THE MANSTER Movie Review

The Manster—Half Man,
Half Monster
The Split

This cheapo 1959 exploitation picture—a Japanese/American co-production—is truly awful. Yet the picture sticks with you because there's a weird kind of sincerity in its ineptitude, and it approaches being truly grotesque as opposed to merely gross. An extremely American reporter (Peter Dyneley in a bizarrely stilted “performance”) on assignment in Japan has a run-in with a mad scientist, Dr. Suzuki, whose inhuman experiments on humans never fail to go wrong. Suzuki injects the reporter with his latest experimental serum, and soon the poor Yankee lug becomes a sex-crazed, bad-tempered drunk. Worse, he discovers that he has a new eyeball, and it's growing out of his shoulder. Soon he's sprouting a whole new head, and then a second body, which he ends up wrestling with in the film's big finish. (Did Bergman see this before writing Persona? You be the judge!) At first you may think of Raymond Burr's sequences as American reporter Steve Martin in the original Godzilla, King of the Mansters, but here it's the reporter who's the monster—er, manster; it's as if Burr's Steve Martin dropped some bad acid, though we get the hallucinations. The Monster may remind you of grade? American 1950s schlock filler like The Black Sleep, but there's nothing else exactly like it. (Count your blessings.) Recommended for aficionados of this stuff—or fanatical chroniclers of “duality of the soul” movies—only.

NEXT STOP … The Thing with Two Heads, Shadow of a Doubt, Persona

1959 72m/B JP Peter Dyneley, Jane Hylton, Satoshi Nakamura, Terri Zimmern; D: Kenneth Crane, George Breakston. VHS SNC, MRV