Matango

My wife likes mushrooms.  Me, not so much.  For Christmas she got a couple of these DIY mushroom growing bricks.  You water them, wait a while and this is what happens.

I'm not 100% sure why I dislike mushrooms.  It's not the taste really, they are actually enjoyable if chopped up small enough to be unobtrusive.  Maybe it has something to do with how fast they grow, they seem like something that could metastasize, could grow wild and out of control before you noticed it.

And perhaps that is why a movie I watched long ago made such an impact on me.  When I was a young lad it was of course cartoons and sugary cereal every Saturday morning.  But after noon the programming switched over to Monster Movies.  Mostly these were black and white B grade offerings.  

One really put a scare in me.  It was called "Matango" in the original Japanese.  But for the matinee movie it was dubbed "Attack of the Mushroom People".  Pretty simple plot really.  Seven shipwrecked people are on an island where the only food is abundant weird looking mushrooms.  They eventually get hungry enough to eat them. They then became covered with loathsome fungus and turned into mushroom people.

Here's a short summary video of this 1963 classic:

Sure it is unlikely that having a colony of weird, rapidly growing mushrooms in my dining room is going to cause problems on this scale.  But, hey, take a look at what these guys had grown into 48 hours later...