It's probably taken us way too long to get to this one. "Monster A Go-Go!" is widely considered one of the worst movies ever made and it doesn't take you too long into the movie to see why. Putting aside the silly, conventional, and dragging plot of the thing, it is a technical nightmare to try to decode. This movie makes Ed Wood's directing look masterful in comparison. Yes, I said it.If you really want to know what it's about, I researched it for you. Let me again point out that I said "researched it." Sarah, our expert plot follower, turned to me when the movie was almost over and said dejectedly, "You're going to have to Wikipedia this one." This seemed reasonable to me as I had spaced out halfway through the film and never fully focused back in on it. Usually Sarah has a way of unravelling even the most obscure of plots but what happened here was not a case of convolution but of a failure in sound editing. Almost all of the dialogue in the movie is hard to hear and at least a quarter of it is completely incomprehensible. The film makers clearly had only one microphone and it was probably attached to the camera itself. I guess what happens is that an astronaut falls to Earth but they can't find his body in the unreasonably tiny capsule he was supposed to be traveling in because he has been turned into a giant space monster by radiation. A bunch of scientists wander around trying to find a cure and the monster at one point kills some teens necking in a parked car (who left a party where beach pop was playing; the only possible explanation for the title). In the end they capture the monster, "Thing From Another World" style but it disappears and it turns out the astronaut was not the monster and had been found somewhere else. So it was a sequel set-up! I mean, alien!
Aside from the spectacularly bad sound editing that would have been even more of a nightmare had it not been for an overdramatic voiceover explaining portions of the plot and the simple story that still managed to be hard to follow, the film was weirdly shot with an occasional fish-eye effect or the look that the camera is being held by a drunk person. This effect is especially dizzying when a bunch of firetrucks appear and anyone prone to epileptic fits may want to close their eyes. There are a bunch of characters who seem to change halfway through and the flow from one scene to another is basically nonexistent. Watching this movie is like watching a very slow explosion from a distance: destructive and only fascinating at first because then it's just the same thing going on for a long time.
After the movie we watched an after school special I won't be doing a full write up on called, "Mr. T's Be Somebody or Be Somebody's Fool." It's a lot of terrible songs and Mr. T spouting wisdom to kids about how to live a good life. For example, to the start of a segment on personal style, Mr. T says, "Everybody gotta wear clothes or else you get arrested." Words to live by. We highly recommend it.
Quotes:
"The capsule came back."
"But what about him?"
"He looks worse than the other ones."
Spoon Rating: 5.
Adam's Grandma's Review: "It was terrible. Bad, bad movie."
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