The unsolvable riddle that is 'Monster a Go-Go' (1965)

Herschell Gordon Lewis tried to make something marketable out of an unfinished Bill Rebane film.

An ad for the film.

If I asked you to imagine the movies that typically wound up on Mystery Science Theater 3000, you'd probably think of those crummy, low-budget science-fiction and horror films made between the 1950s and the 1970s. These were shoddily-produced exploitation flicks that were shipped out to undiscriminating drive-in audiences across America for decades. These quickies were relentlessly hawked through hyperbolic trailers, posters, and radio ads that routinely made promises the actual movies—often slow-moving, static, and talky—could never keep. They featured unconvincing monsters, aliens, spaceships, and mad scientists, and they had attention-grabbing titles, often containing words like "space," "attack," "creature," and "invasion."

As silly as these movies were, there's a kind of innocence or naivete to them. Eventually, as home video supplanted the drive-ins, exploitation movies increased the amount of sex and violence, and the old-school, MST3K-style movies started looking a little quaint in comparison. Today, these movies are mostly seen as curios of a bygone era, beloved by some, despised by a few, and ignored by most.

If you stand way back and squint, Monster a Go-Go (1965) is the very kind of movie I've been describing. It was even used on MST3K in 1993 during the show's fourth season on Comedy Central. In the broadest sense, the film is typical genre fare. The plot goes something like this: an American space capsule has crash-landed in a field in Illinois. On board is astronaut Frank Douglas, but radiation has transformed him into a hideous, eight-foot-tall, Frankenstein-like monster with blisters all over his face. Still wearing his spacesuit, he mindlessly roams the area, occasionally murdering civilians. The military tries to locate Douglas and put a stop to his rampage. Meanwhile, scientists attempt to come up with an antidote for his condition, and Frank's grieving family worries about him. Complicating matters is the fact that Douglas is highly radioactive. It all leads to a tense finale set in the Chicago sewers.

Par for the course, right? 

Henry Hite as Frank Douglas.

Well, if you have ever sat through Monster a Go-Go, you know that the synopsis I just gave barely describes the film. Put simply, this is one of the oddest and most confounding viewing experiences of my life. A great many movies claim to depict our dreams, but Monster a Go-Go is one of the rare ones that accurately replicates the dreamworld—not as we would like it to be, but as it is. 

Throughout the movie, characters appear and disappear without explanation. Vital sequences seem to be missing. Other sequences seem to have been left in the movie by accident. The plot progresses in an illogical way that leaves the viewer feeling powerless and frustrated. Questions go unanswered. And, above all, time passes strangely. The film only runs about 68 minutes but seems to last for hours or even days. By the end, we cannot be sure exactly what we have experienced.

Much of the film's disorienting strangeness can be attributed to the way it was produced. Wisconsin filmmaker Bill Rebane, then a novice, began making a science-fiction/horror movie called Terror at Half Day in 1961. His goal was to capitalize on the escalating space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. He actually managed to recruit some established performers, including veteran screen actress June Travis and vaudeville performer Henry Hite, the latter of whom played astronaut Frank Douglas. But the production ran out of money several times, and Rebane abandoned it to concentrate on other projects. He eventually became a prolific director of horror films, including The Giant Spider Invasion (1975), which also wound up on MST3K in 1997.

Circa 1965, filmmaker Herschell Gordon Lewis, who had pioneered the so-called "splatter" film with Blood Feast (1963), decided he needed a second feature to pair with his movie Moonshine Mountain (1964). Lewis was friends with Rebane and had even been a production assistant on Terror at Half Day. He bought the rights to the unused footage, added a few linking scenes and narration, and released the final product under an outrageous new title: Monster a Go-Go. He even gave the film one of his notorious, self-penned theme songs! I first read about the movie when John Waters interviewed Lewis for the book Shock Value (1981):

JW: Monster A Go Go? Talk about an obscure one!

HGL: I'll tell you that story. I had had some dissatisfaction with film distributors because of how they split the funds for a double feature. The nature of distribution is well known. Those people are monsters, yet they are your friends. I felt I should control both halves of the double feature. I had one film I had just shot called Moonshine Mountain—a pretty good little picture, half mountain music, half gore. I needed a second picture to go with it. A fellow I know had filmed something called Terror at Half Bay [sic]—he shot eighty thousand feet of film and had no picture. As often happens, he ran out of money. We shot some other footage and bought his uncut negative. Out of his eighty thousand feet, there was no action at all. He had hired the tallest man in the world, Henry Height [sic], who just died last year. Henry was a real sweetheart. He was so big that his ankles cracked—he was simply too big for his ankles. Henry played an astronaut who went to outer space and came back doubled in size. They put some pizza or something on his face to give him a strange look. I shot a couple thousand more feet of film—close-ups of hands holding telegrams, feet walking, anything to make it come out—there was no sense to it.

JW: Did it turn out to be a success?

HGL: Oh, yes. Mostly in the South.

After reading Shock Value sometime in the 1990s, I was mad to see Monster a Go-Go. But, much like the movies of Ed Wood, it was not readily accessible to me back then. We didn't get Comedy Central, so even the MST3K episode was off-limits. Today, I have seen the film in both its "raw" and "riffed" forms. I have even read the book Monster a Go-Go Decoded (2019) by Kevin Scott Collier. It's a slim but entertaining little volume that traces the history of the film from its original conception to its ultimate destiny on home video. Collier uses an interview with Rebane as his primary source, but the story the director gives is not radically different from the account that Lewis gave Waters.

Did Monster a Go-Go live up to my expectations? Sort of yes and sort of no. One of the film's original taglines was: "You've never seen a picture like this—thank goodness!" And that's not exactly a lie. The movie is a one-of-a-kind oddball, but not quite in the way I was hoping. Considering the outlandish title, I expected the film to be a wild, high-energy romp, perhaps something like an episode of Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, but with monsters instead of hippie comedians. But the surprisingly somber Monster a Go-Go is not like that at all. 

For much of the film, we watch in utter stupefaction as interchangeable or unidentified characters have endless, droning conversations in uninteresting locations: a living room, an office, a restaurant, etc. Sometimes, just to switch things up, they'll have these conversations at an airfield or out in the woods somewhere. Nearly all the action/violence in the film happens offscreen and is related to us through (vague) dialogue or (monotone) narration. Much of the audio is murky. Many of the shots are underlit. Watching the movie is like trying to swim laps in a pool filled with mashed potatoes.

I suppose, hidden in the depths of this deeply unsettling movie, are a few identifiable themes or ideas. There are general, societal issues at play here: anxieties about space exploration and the feeling that science and technology have overstepped their bounds. And there are more personal worries here as well: the possibility that some terrible fate might befall a loved one or that we ourselves may be attacked by something we cannot control or understand, something that emerges from the dark and then returns to the dark. 

In the muddled tragedy of Frank Douglas, we see how even a law-abiding astronaut—and, by all accounts, a very decent and caring person—can become a monster and an outcast. And we suspect that there may just be a monster a go-go dwelling within our souls, too.