MONSTER A-GO GO (1965)
Article 3393 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 10-16-2010
Posting Date: 11-28-2010
Directed by Bill Rebane and Herschell Gordon Lewis
Country: USA
What it is: Seventy minutes of footage

A capsule lands. A radioactive monster who was once an astronaut comes out. People die. People investigate. People dance. A car runs out of gas. Movie is padded out to feature length.

No movie this static and lifeless should have the words “A-GO GO” in its title. This movie was originally directed by Bill Rebane in the early sixties but was abandoned when funding ran out. Several years later, Herschell Gordon Lewis bought the existing footage, and then added new footage of his own so he’d have a companion feature to MOONSHINE MOUNTAIN. My guess is that this is one of these two directors’ worst movie and the other’s second worst. For what it’s worth, Lewis does seem to make his new footage blend in with the old footage, but that’s no compliment; however, since he couldn’t get the original cast for his new scenes, the movie still comes across as disjointed and unfocused. It’s shot in a flat distant style, the sound is bad, the narration is ill-timed, intrusive, and gives away the important things that will happen in scenes before they happen, there are a wealth of pointless scenes that go nowhere, huge gaps exist between line deliveries… all these things conspire to drive viewer interest away at every moment. I’ve heard some people say the ending is clever, but I interpret it as meaning that Lewis got tired of even trying to finish the movie and came up with it as a way to get it off his plate; to me, it’s the movie thumbing its nose at the audience. I wonder how soon the drive-ins cleared out after this movie started.