After creating Godzilla in the 1954, Ishirō Honda spent most of the next two decades primarily working on kaiju films of all sorts. I'm a fan of a lot of his work, so I was intrigued when I noticed this film, Matango, which doesn't feature any kaiju. The story is about a group of young rich people who are shipwrecked during their weekend away from Tokyo, and find themselves on an island of evil fungi that slowly turn the cast into mushroom people. That premise sounds as silly as Mothra fighting Godzilla, but Honda plays it darker than his usual films of the era. He takes this movie not only to work outside of his usual genre space, but to stretch his wings creatively in different ways.
Visually, Honda is playful throughout this movie while maintaining its slightly more grounded tone. The fact that the whole film is plainly done on sound stages may give it a hokey look, but Honda embraces that by leading the cast into increasingly unreal sets as the movie goes along. When they reach the boat haunted by evil mushrooms, the set dressing and highly saturated color palate make everything look appropriately eerie. This escalates as one by one they give into the mushroom's mind control and the movie gets heavier on visual effects, whether that's guys in silly mushroom costumes or montages of beautiful women sexily seducing the men into eating the mushrooms. It's remarkable that Honda can balance fun, goofy elements like that without throwing a wrench into the serious tone that he portrays all this with.
I highly recommend Matango. It absolutely stands up as one of Honda's best movies alongside both the serious and the silly kaiju films that I love.