To me, this movie is perfection.

Good start, but then it gets ruined

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

"Monster A Go-Go" was supposed to be the first feature film for Bill Rebane, who started filming this thing in 1961. His monster flick, originally called "Terror At Halfday", had a budget of 80.000 dollars, which was pretty much gone after a couple of days of filming. After he ran out of funding the film lay on the shelf for about four years, unfinished and with no hope (or desire) of actually being released.Cue Herschell Gordon Lewis (of "Blood Feast" fame), always on the look-out for the cheapest way he could get a film released. So he bought the abandoned footage from "Terror At Halfday" and 'finished' the movie. To cut costs, he decided to only ask a couple of performers back, which did not include Henry Hite. I should point out Henry Hite played the monster. He finished this monster flick ... without the monster. That's one of the main reasons why this movie feels like such a blatantly cynical cash grab.So Lewis only had a tiny little bit of footage shot with Henry Hite, and none of that footage could be edited to look like an actual ending. Lewis 'solved' that problem by creating one of the saddest anti-climaxes in the history of filmmaking. I honestly can't imagine how the people that paid to see this left the theatre after this screening. To quote Rich Hall: "It was so bad I wanted everyone's money back!". That was about a Bob Dylan concert, but it works equally well for this movie.For what it's worth: Rebane actually did try to shoot a big climax for this, that's actually the main reason the budget ran out so quickly. Some of the ending scenes feature dozens of extras, so that's clearly Rebane's footage. Lewis really wouldn't bother to do any of that. In later interviews Rebane has stated he hates this movie even more than the audience does, and I can't blame him. Lewis didn't even put his name on it, Rebane is the only credited director. Did I mention he only sold his "Terror At Halfday" footage for 8.000 dollars, while it cost ten times as much to film? I guess he got a really quick course on how film business worked.

This is not an overview as countless others have done, but a simplification."Monster A-Go-Go" is actually two films put together. This isn't a new concept. TV networks do it all the time when a show isn't picked up for the fall schedule; the pilot and first few episodes get slapped together into a movie for LMN or Bravo. Of course, the episodes are related.In Hollywood, there is a tendency to add new footage to flesh out an incomplete film. Examples include "Half Human" and "Best Defense" (yes, the Eddie Murphy movie where Dudley Moore's scenes look added on to save the film).For MAGG, director Bill Rebane started a movie called "Terror At Halfday." 7-foot-6 actor Henry Hite was tabbed to play the monster. However, Hite wasn't available more than a day or so a week, so Rebane filmed around him, doing many dialogue scenes, as well as the aftermath of the monster's attacks. Then, when Hite was available, Rebane got three or four scenes done.Then, the money ran out. What Rebane had was a ton of raw, unedited footage that was out of sequence because of shooting around Hite's personal schedule.Herschell Gordon Lewis, the legendary Z-movie director/producer/actor/extra, needed a film to fill out a double bill. So, he purchased Rebane's unfinished film (Rebane, unable to find further financing, lost the rights to the original). Lewis decided to film some additional scenes and added his own voice as narration to futilely try to cover the numerous Grand Canyon-size holes.Unfortunately, most of the actors from "Terror At Halfday" were either unavailable or unwilling to return. A few did, including a man who gained a bunch of weight in the intervening years and had to play the brother of his original character! Facing a time deadline to get the double bill out, Lewis simply added the additional scenes on to the end of the original. He cobbled together the previous scenes and narrated past the attack scene aftermath portions without a monster. No narration was done to explain why the original cast simply disappeared, except for the "brother." No real ending was done. Lewis wasn't interested in a coherent movie. He just needed something to fill out the double bill. Unfortunately, what he put out was so horrible and so atrocious, it was all people could talk about. No one even remembers "Moonshine Mountain," the film at the top of the bill. It was much better.The bottom line is that the film was a travesty. It should have stayed on the shelf where Rebane left it. And Lewis should have stuck to single bills or possibly paired "Moonshine Mountain" with "Two Thousand Maniacs." And while Rebane is really blameless here, it's not hard to understand why people think he actively helped Lewis in making MAGG. Rebane did give us the atrocious "Giant Spider Invasion," the abominable "Capture of Bigfoot" and the absurd "Blood Harvest" with Tiny Tim tip-toeing through the tulips as the killer.Coincidentally, both Rebane and Lewis are still alive and capable of knocking Uwe Boll from the top of the dreck heap.

Yes, it's another atrocious flick that you won't want to watch unless it's the version that appears on "Mystery Science Theater 3000". Dr. Forrester and TV's Frank cruelly force Joel, Servo and Crow to watch this incoherent movie about a monster that appears after a spacecraft crashes to earth and the astronaut aboard disappears. Production stopped after they ran out of money, and then resumed four years later, meaning that half of the cast simply disappears! And then, the ending makes NO SENSE. Which of course means that Joel and the 'bots have plenty of funny commentary about the flick. Among other things, they find the time to mention Les Paul, Ravi Shankar and Eve Arden.All in all, "Monster a-Go Go" is a VERY bad one. "MST3K" considered the worst movie that they'd ever shown until they showed "Manos: The Hands of Fate".

Films like Monster a-Go Go feel sent from some other realm to test me. I love old fashioned trash cinema, I'm a great fan of Plan 9 From Outer Space and regard Manos: The Hands of Fate as a near classic, neither with irony. But sometimes a film catches me off-guard with boredom and ineptitude that just can't compute and I break down into boredom, minutes dragging out interminably as my face droops and eyes seek to pull shut. Such was the case here, much as I tried my best. To be fair to the film it never stood much of a chance, originally an unfinished Bill Rebane project, bought up and completed with new footage by HG Lewis. Sanity and coherence were obviously not going to be on the menu here but what really rankles is the lack of interest. The plot isn't too bad, pitting scientists against a poor irradiated astronaut with a deadly touch, but nearly everything in the execution goes wrong. First there are traditional problems. The film all too often opts to tell rather than show events (what it does show is mostly tedious, the camera doesn't even search out images of interesting irrelevance to settle on), and not only that but the narration even spoils scenes just before they take place. Also, there are a number of sound goofs, including numerous occasions where speech is simply too muffled to make out. The music isn't much cop either, nor the acting, but I guess that is somewhat to be expected. The writing has virtually no interest, neither drawing interesting characters nor spinning out fun technical nonsense, it merely drags, with patches of pointless filler that disgrace pointless filler scenes everywhere. Perhaps most irritating is the lack of monster action. Many a terrible film has pulled off an acceptable level of entertainment just by getting a creature on screen and offing people at an acceptable rate (The Creeping Terror a perfect example of this) but Monster a-Go Go has just a handful of kills, only one of them effective. This is made extra galling by the fact that the monster is simply a tall gentleman in paste face make up that can't have taken more than a few minutes to plaster on, and so can hardly have been a big drain on the budget. He actually looks effective in his few appearances (one of the films few pluses) and really, really should have done more. A couple more spots of fun elevate this just above lobotomy inducing, best being one of the most inept scientists I've ever seen in a film like this. He does nothing right, from helping cause the monster by doing something stupid, then letting the monster cause more damage than it might have done by doing something more stupid. In a moment of almost inspired comedy he even sheepishly owns up to his own ineptitude, which I must admit made me smile. There is also a mostly pointless dancing scene which probably only appeals to fans of pointless dancing scenes (ie. people like me) so thats a plus, and there's the ending. It is breathtakingly useless and therefore memorable. Yes, I know that isn't a good thing to most people. Altogether this film is pretty much atrocious, and not in a good way. Exercise caution before viewing would be my advice.