Project Terrible: The Manster (1959)

Mwhahaha! Nice try, Mr. Robert Mohr, but I actually thought The Manster was pretty sweet - if you dig 1950s B-movies about science gone wrong and a man with two heads. And seriously, who wouldn't? Anyways, for those of you just tuning in, Project Terrible is back for another round (number 9, I believe?) to help kick off the year 2013 and this time we have a new recruit! Alex from Alex Jowski Movie Reviews has joined PT with my fellow veterans Alec from Mondo Bizarro, Maynard from Maynard Morrissey's Horror Movie Diary, and Robert Mohr from Gaming Creatively. Don't slack off, Alex, we're totally serious about our terrible movies.

The Manster is the story of Larry Stanford who is a foreign news correspondent working in Tokyo. On his last assignment before returning home to his wife, Larry visits scientist Dr. Robert Suzuki in his lab on the mountainside of a volcano. Suzuki drugs Larry and injects him with an experimental enzyme he's been working on. Suzuki and his beautiful assistant Tara then follow Larry, keeping him in Tokyo, so that they may study the effects of the enzyme. Larry's personality starts to change, making him into sort of a playboy, until he finally starts to turn violent. His physical appearance changes in a ghastly way, and sends him on a killing spree which leads the local police on a big manhunt to stop him.

So yeah, The Manster is kind of awesome. I like that it is set in Japan and that a Japanese scientist is the crazy one this time. I like that it is a B-movie but is still pretty good at the same time. I like the effects work on Larry and one other humanster that we meet in the movie. I like that the whole scientific explanation for what Suzuki is doing makes absolutely no sense. I like that the doctor's name is Suzuki. I like that the movie is short enough to not wear out its welcome. It's just a fun ole flick, you guys.

The audience actually gets to see what Larry will turn into in the first scene. Turns out to be something not completely unlike the Abominable Snowman. Genji is one of the first of Dr. Suzuki's experimental mansters that is shown killing a bunch of geisha girls. Discovering what he's done, Suzuki kills Genji. There's also a strangely deformed woman locked up in the basement of the doctor's lab. Big twist at the end reveals that Genji is the doctor's brother and the woman is his wife. Yet he still tries his experiment with Larry. Hey, if it didn't work before and had terrible consequences wherein I had to thrown my own brother's horribly deformed body into a fire and later shoot my own wife, then, heck, let's try it again! If movies have taught me anything, it is that scientists are arrogant morons.

At first, it seems like the only thing the drug does to Larry is turn him into your typical male douchebag. Instead of going home to the wife he hasn't seen in apparently months or something like that, Larry chooses to stay in Japan and let Dr. Suzuki show him all the fun stuff to do around Tokyo. Pretty soon Larry is getting frisky with a whole gaggle of geisha girls and taking naked mineral baths with Tara. Then he just pretty blatantly starts cheating on his wife, Linda, with Tara. And when Linda shows up in Tokyo and confronts Larry, asking him to choose between her and Tara, he does the annoying thing and walks out with Tara. So then is this "manster" stuff some kind of rip on men and their macho behavior? That's what I like to believe, even though it's probably not true.

Peter Dyneley is great as Larry - or all versions of the character that come about in the film. He's at first a typical nice, normal guy and then is able to turn into to the 50s version of a philandering asshole. I was so hoping for the acting to be really ridiculously cheesy and was almost bummed when it wasn't because that would have been way more entertaining. The chick playing Tara had almost no emotions, but then again her character makes it a point of telling us several times that she lost all ability to have any feelings a long time ago. She never really tells us why and I don't care. She's pretty to look at, and that's all she's there for.

One cool thing that I learned from The Manster is that this is what Sam Raimi totally ripped off of for that whole two-headed Ash sequence in Army of Darkness. Larry keeps getting these strange pains in his neck/shoulder area where Suzuki injected the drug into him. In the best scene of the movie, Larry starts screaming in pain until he finally rips his robe off his shoulder to reveal ----- a freaking eyeball! How fantastic! Certainly got a little yelp of surprise out of me. The effects on this look pretty good and also later when the little eyeball turns into a full-grown second head popping out of Larry's shoulder. It's a little hairy, it's a little deformed, but it looks good - grotesque with a side of silly, I like to say, which is actually a good way to describe the whole film.

The Manster is surprisingly a really good and fun little flick that is serious enough not to be overly ridiculous, but the story is still silly enough to keep it squarely in the realm of B-moviedom. I was expecting stupid, and instead I got awesome. I love it. Looks like I've got one more sci-fi monster-ish movie left for this Project Terrible, so perhaps that one will be worse. In the meantime, rock on, Manster. Rock on.