Ah, Monster a Go-Go!—a film so baffling, so broken, so boldly incompetent that it feels less like a movie and more like a cruel psychological experiment disguised as a 68-minute endurance test. Directed by Bill Rebane and (reluctantly) finished by schlockmeister Herschell Gordon Lewis, this cinematic trainwreck is proof that sometimes the scariest monster of all is the editor’s total absence.
👨🚀 The Plot That Forgot to Exist
Monster a Go-Go! opens with a missing astronaut named Frank Douglas, whose capsule returns to Earth sans human, but with some charred grass nearby—aka the first and last piece of physical evidence anyone will bother investigating. Then, because the filmmakers were apparently allergic to visual storytelling, we’re informed via narrator (more on him later) that a giant radioactive humanoid is now on the loose.
Do we see this monster arrive? No. Do we see the missing astronaut’s transformation? Of course not. That would require budget, actors, and continuity. What we do get are men in khaki uniforms staring into the middle distance and chain-smoking while discussing things they’ll never actually show us. Remember Chekhov’s Gun? This movie shoots you with a rusty fork and then blames gravity.
The monster—played by Henry Hite, a 7’6″ man who deserves hazard pay—appears sporadically, looking like Frankenstein’s monster melted in a tanning bed. He strangles people, kind of. Again, most of the “action” is narrated over stock footage or scenes where no one actually dies on camera. This movie is allergic to momentum.
🧠 Dialogue That Leaps Into the Abyss
Here’s a sample line of narration:
“There was nothing in the tunnel but the puzzled men of courage, who suddenly found themselves alone with shadows and darkness!”
Puzzled men of courage? More like bored actors of minimum wage. The film’s constant reliance on its omniscient narrator feels like the desperate ramblings of a man who realizes, mid-sentence, that the movie isn’t actually happening. You could close your eyes and listen to the voiceover and still have the exact same idea of what’s going on: none.
And when the movie finally does sputter to an end, it doesn’t resolve the plot—it erases it.
“Then who, or what, has landed here?… Is it here yet? Or has the cosmic switch been pulled?”
This is the sci-fi equivalent of your grandma saying, “Oh, I forgot what I was talking about,” then leaving the room.
🎬 The Production: An Amateur’s Frankenstein
Here’s how the movie came to life, in Frankensteinian fashion:
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Step 1: Bill Rebane begins filming a sci-fi thriller in 1961.
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Step 2: Runs out of money and gives up.
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Step 3: Herschell Gordon Lewis buys the footage to package with his own film (Moonshine Mountain—because nothing says double-feature like mutant monsters and Appalachian folk music).
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Step 4: Lewis adds new scenes with new actors who don’t match, and completes it with glue, narration, and mouth-made telephone sound effects. Yes, that’s right—at one point someone actually makes a brrrrrrring! noise into the camera and we’re supposed to believe it’s a phone ringing.
Half the original cast mysteriously vanish from the movie (presumably vaporized by the script), replaced by new characters who just… show up. The original actor playing Dr. Logan was unavailable, so the replacement plays “his brother,” despite no one acknowledging this until halfway through the film. It’s like the cinematic version of your substitute teacher pretending nothing happened after the fire alarm.
🧟 The Monster (Sort of) Appears
Let’s talk about the “monster,” who could best be described as “The Boring Colossus.” He appears roughly three times, shuffles like he’s trying to remember where he parked his spaceship, and then disappears entirely. He’s radioactive, apparently, but the film shows no radiation, no effect, no stakes.
The climax involves the military chasing him into a sewer, but rather than a confrontation or, God forbid, an actual scene, we get another dose of existentially confused narration telling us that he vanished—poof! Just gone. “Maybe he never existed,” the voiceover suggests. Or maybe you just ran out of film stock and said, “Screw it.”
🎥 The Horror, the Horror
To call Monster a Go-Go! a “bad movie” is to misunderstand its black hole of entertainment. It doesn’t rise to the level of funny-bad, campy-bad, or even so-bad-it’s-good. No, this is a movie so profoundly inept that it accidentally invents a new cinematic genre: anti-movie.
The lighting is atrocious. The editing feels like a blindfolded chimp armed with kitchen scissors. The music ranges from “elevator jazz for ghouls” to silence so deep you can hear the actors thinking about their careers. And don’t even ask about the pacing—there’s more tension in a coma ward.
🧾 Final Verdict: A Cosmic Switch to the Off Position
Monster a Go-Go! is an artifact of failed ambition and financial desperation, cobbled together by two men who didn’t even pretend to care. It offers no thrills, no kills, and no narrative cohesion. Watching it is like being trapped in a void where plot, performance, and logic go to die—and then come back as poorly dubbed voiceover.
If you’ve ever wanted to experience what a sci-fi film would look like if it were edited with a butter knife during a power outage, Monster a Go-Go! is for you.
Rating: 0.5 out of 5 Telepathic Narrators
Because sometimes, the scariest thing of all… is realizing there was never a monster—just 68 minutes of your life you’ll never get back.
Now excuse me while I pull my own cosmic switch and pretend this movie didn’t happen.
