Monster A Go-Go!

The project was the brainchild of director Bill Rebane, and began filming in 1961 under the title Terror at Half Day. Inspired by the success of the drive-in pictures made by Roger Corman for American International Pictures, Rebane decided, in his own words, "to create a screenplay that would have some timeliness and exploitation values." He funded the production with ten thousand dollars of his own money, and combined it with fifty thousand from two other investors: Fred Friedloeb (brother of Hollywood producer Burt Friedloeb) and actress June Travis (who appears in the film). Rebane almost convinced a Hollywood icon to star in the picture. In an undated interview with Bill Coleman, Rebane recalled, "During pre-production and casting of the picture, I was hanging out on Randolph Street one rainy day in Chicago with my associate and press agent with a lot of guts: Larry Leverett. We were late to some meeting so we were rushing, and practically ran over this other trench-coated man also rushing to get under the marquee and out of the downpour. The trench coat-wearing man happened to be Ronald Reagan. Larry and I had few inhibitions in those days. Subsequently we blurted out the whole concept of Terror at Half Day to Ronald Reagan, standing there together under the marquee of the Woods Theater. We not only recited a synopsis but made sure to tell Ronald Reagan that June Travis was committed to the picture and that he would be the perfect star for our picture...He wanted to see a script and asked us to work out the deal with his agent whose name he carefully wrote on a pad of paper for us. He said that if we could work it out he might be interested." Ultimately, Reagan did not appear in the film. If he had, Monster A-Go Go would no doubt have, by the 1980s, become a household word. "What made this such an extraordinary experience, never to be forgotten by myself, is that the man while in the twilight of his acting career but destined to be the president of our country had no problems standing for about ten minutes with total strangers on a Chicago sidewalk to talk about a possible role in yet another B movie." The biggest star in Monster A-Go Go (pun intended) turned out to be Henry Hite (1915-1972). Rebane remembered, "Now, it so happened that at that time I knew the tallest man in the world, quite well. Henry Hite, of the vaudeville act Lowe, Hite and Stanley." Born Henry Mullens, he adopted a stage name that would better emphasize his height. He made a career of personal appearances, capitalizing on his extraordinary height. Hite claimed to be 8'2", but in actuality stood just over 7' 6". Rebane found that Hite, "made a perfect monster without elaborate special effects or prosthetics." Some prosthetics were used to give the actor's face a properly monstrous appearance. However, these pasty globs only appear in some scenes. Unfortunately, Rebane was only able to film a portion of the script when the production ran out of funds. The footage languished for several years until, circa 1964, it fell into the hands of indie filmmaker Herschell Gordon Lewis. Rebane had worked for Lewis's commercial studio, "as a kid doing part-time sales in 1959." In fact, Rebane had been inspired to undertake Terror at Half Day after watching Lewis independently shoot the risqué feature The Prime Time (1960) in Chicago. In 1964, Lewis completed Moonshine Mountain, a bootlegging car-chase drama aimed at the Southern sh*t-kicking drive-in market. This very specialized genre had been popularized by Robert Mitchum's Thunder Road (1958), which was a perennial favorite on the circuit. Because double bills were de rigeur in the drive-in domain, Lewis needed to pair Moonshine Mountain with a second film if he wanted to squeeze the most possible mileage out of his knock-off. Lewis explained, "In that period, if you didn't have a second feature, the distributor would throw in another second feature and claim to each producer that that picture was the second half, then pay $25 flat instead of a percentage. I wanted to make sure that I controlled the play, so I always had two pictures coming out together." Lewis improvised his own second feature by patching together the remnants of Terror at Half Day. "There wasn't much of a movie, no climax or anything," Lewis recalled, "so I turned it into a parody called Monster A-Go Go and used it as a second half with Moonshine Mountain." Sources disagree on the amount of input Lewis had into Monster A-Go Go -- whether he shot additional footage or merely re-edited Rebane's footage and tied it together with new narration. This history of the film is written with the assumption that Lewis did in fact shoot new material, with the understanding that it may not be 100% accurate. To the best of his limited ability, Lewis fleshed out the man-who-fell-to-earth drama with dashes of sex, rock'n'roll, and comedy, whose tonal shifts only made the film more difficult to comprehend. As if throwing up his hands on the whole affair, Lewis then overlaid the film with Twilight Zone-style ruminations that challenge the viewer to puzzle out the plot. It begins with the statement, "What you are about to see may not even be possible within the narrow limits of human understanding." And only gets more confusing from there. Herschell Gordon Lewis's name does not appear in the credits of Monster A-Go Go. Instead, he uses the moniker Sheldon S. Seymour, and is credited as producer, as well as providing additional dialogue (Lewis also voices the narration). Lewis later employed the S.S.S. moniker for the films Something Weird (1967), Suburban Roulette (1968), and Miss Nymphet's Zap-In (1970), among others. Monster A-Go Go eventually reached the drive-in screens in 1965. According to contemporary film/video critic Shane Dallmann, "the film received precious little (if any) theatrical play anywhere else, and didn't get much more attention when it surfaced as an obscure home video release in the 1980s." by Bret Wood SOURCES: Interview with Bill Rebane: http://www.bijouflix.com/innerviews/rebane_interview1.htm Detailed plot description: http://www.agonybooth.com/recaps/Monster_A_Go_Go_1965.aspx

The opening titles appear over a static shot of a galaxy of stars. According to pop culture historian Albert Walker, the exact same image was used under the opening titles of Rebane's film The Giant Spider Invasion (1975). The working title Terror in Half Day refers to an unincorporated settlement on the outskirts of Chicago, where portions of the film were shot. Local legend has it that the village was so named because it took half a day to reach it from Chicago by carriage. Other sources claim it was named after a Native American chief. Director Herschell Gordon Lewis is best remembered today for his collaborations with producer David F. Friedman. They made nudist pictures in the early 1960s, before embarking on a cinematic experiment that changed the face of the horror film. Beginning with Blood Feast (1963), they made a series of films with gratuitous shots of explicit gore. The films were an immense success, and soon virtually every drive-in exploitation film sported lingering shots of actors spattered with blood and viscera. Lewis made Monster A-Go Go just as his partnership with Friedman was coming to an end. Friedman is not believed to have been involved in the making of the film. According to modern sources, the actor who portrayed Dr. Logan had changed so much between the original shoot in 1961 and the 1964 retakes that he posed a continuity problem. To remedy this, Lewis (or Rebane) concocted a new character for him to play: Henry Logan's twin brother Conrad. The most fascinating aspect of Monster A-Go Go is an extended sequence (much of it out of focus) of Chicago's Civil Defense rescue trucks being mobilized to stop the marauding alien. The sight of this actual radioactivity response team reminds the 21st-century viewer of the Cold War context of the film, when the threat of nuclear annihilation was a clear and present danger to the average American. The voice on the radio sounding a red alert is that of director Bill Rebane. Rebane was born in Riga, Latvia in 1937, and was educated in Germany until emigrating to the U.S. circa 1952. "I came to America from Germany when I was 15 and couldn't speak English," Rebane said in a 2002 interview, "I lived on the south side of Chicago, off 63rd St. I went to four movies a day and in six months, learned to speak English. The moment I could, I got myself a little red wagon, and went to the supermarket and made myself a bundle of money delivering groceries for people." After high school, he studied drama at Goodman's Art Institute in Chicago. Rebane went on to actually complete some films. After working in the film industry in Germany for a time, he set up a production company: the Shooting Ranch Motion Picture Studios in Gleason, Wisconsin. His best-known achievement was 1975's The Giant Spider Invasion. Among the more colorful Rebane titles is 1987's Blood Harvest, which features musician Tiny Tim as a demonic ukulele-playing clown named Marvelous Mervo. Upon watching Terror at Half Day redux, Rebane called it, "the worst picture ever made. And I mean it." Rebane suggests that the film was not true to the kinds of pictures he really wanted to make. "I departed from what I wanted to do. First, I became aware of what was making money in those days in the independent arena. American International Pictures' Sam Arkoff, Jim Nicholson, and Roger Corman were setting the trend. It was logical to do something that has some exploitation values and was relatively easy to make. After all, all it took was some kind of monster. Right?" "I was into the musical and westerns as a kid. I just fell into the sci-fi groove while all the time writing screenplays of different types were my way of justifying all the B movie fare I was producing...'One more and we'll have enough to make a major picture,' I'd say." Many filmmakers delve into schlock filmmaking with the expectation of earning a few dollars and then steering their careers to a higher road. Few, however, are able to find their way back, as Rebane discovered. "I soon realized my B movies had typecast me, even as a producer. Once you get into the B movie mode, nobody wants to talk to you about a comedy, a drama, or for that matter any serious effort." In 2002, Rebane made an unsuccessful bid for the governorship of Wisconsin, as the American Reform Party candidate. "My campaign platform is that I am a non-politician," Rebane declared, "Politicians are out of touch with reality. Unless he is a real statesman, it doesn't take a professional politician to represent people." He was not elected. Some sources say he had previously run in the 1978 election. In 1993, Monster A-Go Go was initiated into the pantheon of kitsch when it was visually defiled and verbally mocked in an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (the cinematic equivalent of graffiti). Today, Herschell Gordon Lewis works as a direct marketing consultant in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and has authored numerous books on advertising, copywriting and motivation, such as Sales Letters That Sizzle: All the Hooks, Lines, and Sinkers You'll Ever Need to Close Sales (1999). He still makes forays into stranger realms, directing Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat (2002), and co-authoring the book Everybody's Guide to Plate Collecting with wife Margo Lewis. The expression "A-Go Go" (usually written as "a Go-Go") was popularized in the counter-culture movement of the 1960s. It is derived from the French term "ˆ gogo," which means "galore." Monster A-Go Go stands as one of the earliest published usages of the name in the U.S., probably inspired by the first Whisky a Go-Go nightclub, which opened in 1958 in Chicago, where the film was made. Theatrical trailer: "Go! Go to this theatre to see the science fiction picture to end all science fiction pictures! Did he or didn't he? Is he a monster or isn't he? Only his space agency knows for sure, and they won't tell...Here's the picture that grabs the screen and shakes it. The picture that makes you wonder if the earth is coming to an end, right in the theatre in front of you. Never in your life have you seen such a combination of happy, sad, good, bad, rock 'em sock 'em action. When you walk out, you'll wonder what you've seen, because never has there been a motion picture like this! ... With a genuine ten-foot tall monster to give you the wim-wams. Monster A-Go Go! With astronauts and space capsules and pretty girls. And cosmic radiation...and pretty girls. And screams...and pretty girls...The picture with 'Go.'" by Bret Wood SOURCES: Interview with Bill Rebane: http://www.bijouflix.com/innerviews/rebane_interview1.htm Detailed plot description: http://www.agonybooth.com/recaps/Monster_A_Go_Go_1965.aspx

"By the time Monster A-Go Go gets close to its ending (or, to put it more accurately, the point where the film runs out), you're not even sure if you're still watching a movie, instead of the result of someone pointing a camera in a random direction just to see what it happens to pick up." - Albert Walker, The Agony Booth, 2003. "Monster A-Go Go, for all its theoretical entertainment value, defiantly manages to claim a slot for itself in the ['astronaut becomes monster'] field by virtue of its finale, in which Lewis devises a mysterious 'twist' as a smokescreen for the fact that the film actually has no ending whatsoever ('uncompleted' means uncompleted!). Southern drive-in audiences were left to chew on this as the drive-in double bill came to an end." - Shane M. Dallmann, Video Watchdog, 2003. "Another one of those ya-gotta-see-it-to-believe-it! numbers...this flatfooted foolishness has all the charm of a 70-minute rectal examination." - James O'Neill, Terror on Tape "It's a familiar yarn about an ill-fated astronaut who returns to Earth as a 10-foot-tall, 400-pound, pizza-faced monstrosity...who turns anyone he paws into an overgrown and very lifeless PRUNE! (Even if a "dead" actor can't quite hold a twisted grimace for his postmortem closeup). Bikini'd babes jiggle for their lives as this beast lumbers hither and yon, miraculously managing to evade capture. Marvel at the much-too-tiny cardboard space capsule and, most of all, behold how Lewis adeptly handles an actor's amazing-disappearing toupee." - G. Noel Gross, CineSchlock-O-Rama, 2001. "About the only good thing in the film is the zombie stomp theme song, whose driving bass mimics the throbbing in your temples from trying to decipher what the Sputnik is going on here. No matter how it was created or the resulting pseudo coherent continuity of the film, Monster plays like a disjointed carnival sideshow, complete with an oversized human stick figure and various other non-acting human oddities." - Bill Gibron, DVD Verdict, 2002. "Probably sourced at random from an anonymous, perverted Mad Libs collection." - Joseph A. Ziemba, Bleeding Skull, 2007. "Hilarious from start to finish and obviously geared toward the bottom half of a double bill, this has the feel of a flipside of a '50s single where they didn't care what the hell happened." - Andrew Hershberger, Mania.com, 2002. "How bad is it? Suffice it to say that Herschell Gordon Lewis was brought in to 'fix' the results." - Charles Kilgore, editor of Ecco Magazine. "Monster A-Go Go is a train wreck of a movie that had such a low budget that someone had to mimic the sound of a telephone ringing. (Badly too, I might add.) I mean this is Manos: The Hands of Fate bad. The plot, what there is of it, involves a space capsule that crashes to Earth, and soon after a tall monster starts running around killing people. It doesn't sound too bad, but so much of the story happens off screen, the viewers are only cued in by the narrator, that this movie easily falls into the "abominably horrible" category." - John Sinnott, DVD Talk Compiled by Bret Wood

Theme song: Go, you monster, back to space, I don't like your haunted face. Alright! Go, you monster, go! Go, you monster, go now! Go, you monster, go! You may come from beyond the moon, But to me, you're just a goon. Alright! Go, you monster, go! Alright now, Go, you monster, go! Investigator: "I've never seen anything like it. He'd shriveled up like a dried prune!" Narrator: "What changes the delicate interlocking of fates that determines life or death? A series of ifs. If the girl had danced with her boyfriend instead of the other boy... and they had stayed later. If the two of them hadn't parked to kiss and make up. But that is not what happened. And fate and history never deal in ifs." Narrator: "Dr. Logan, puzzled by the laboratory analysis, made his own exploratory trip back to the landing area. His theory was proved right. And it was proved right so unexpectedly and so violently that he never lived to record it." Dr. Brent: "Does that bring me up to date?" Officer: "As far as the tragedies." Dr. Brent: "And I thought this was going to be a lock-up. Thought it was just legwork when Manny handed it over to me." Officer: "Legwork?" Dr. Brent: "Yeah, you know, detail stuff, trivia." Officer: "There's nothing trivial about three deaths." Dr. Brent: "That's for sure." Dr. Brent: "How did the animal experiments work out?" Dr. Logan: "Perfectly... for six months." Dr. Brent: "What would happen with an overdose?" Dr. Logan: "An overdose of anything -- candy with a child -- has a bad effect." Col. Connors: "Are you trying to tell me -- ?" Dr. Logan: "Precisely." Narrator: "Logan knew that each passing minute might mean a return to violence. As it turned out, he was too late. Like his brother, the scientist had an intuitive knowledge of the situation... plus an extraordinarily bad sense of timing." News broadcast: "We interrupt this program to bring you a special bulletin. All citizens in the metropolitan area to stay off the streets until further notice. This is an emergency. I repeat, this is an emergency. A man deeply contaminated with radioactivity has been reported missing from the Astrophysical Laboratory. Anyone coming near him is subject to danger of radiation." Narrator: "A city of five million became a huge tomb!" Soldier 1: "What are we supposed to do if something happens? Just stand here?" Soldier 2: "Shut up and watch the scope." Narrator: "There is one terrifying word in the world of nuclear physics: radiation. As the trail grew hot, so did the level of contamination. Here was a problem the Civil Defense authorities had never before faced, and might never see again." Narrator: "One of the weapons against radiation is a decontamination spray, which reduces the level of radioactivity in seconds. Would it work? Or would those who follow the monster's trail be fried inside the lead-lined suits that were all that man could use against forces too large for him to comprehend?" Narrator: "As if a switch had been turned -- as if an eye had blinked -- as if some phantom force in the universe had made a move eons beyond our comprehension -- suddenly there was no trail. There was no giant. No monster. No thing called Douglas to be followed. There was nothing in the tunnel but the puzzled men of courage who suddenly found themselves alone with shadows and darkness." Compiled by Bret Wood