It’s apparent that some effort went into the makeup effects but the limited budget hampered the execution.
Larry Stanford (Peter Dyneley) is an international reporter assigned to cover the work of Dr. Robert Suzuki (Tetsu Nakamura,) who has supposedly made progress in the study of evolution. Stanford goes to Suzuki’s lab for an interview. The lab — which is curiously located in a remote, mountainous area outside of Tokyo — hides some of Dr. Suzuki’s failed experiments.
When Stanford arrives at the lab, Dr. Suzuki begins asking him some borderline personal questions, including his age and when was the last time he was intimate with a woman. Stanford doesn’t know it but Dr. Suzuki is sizing him up to become one of his experiments. Finding Stanford a suitable subject, Suzuki serves him a drugged glass of scotch and then injects him with a serum. Stanford later awakens complaining of a kink in his neck but apologizes to Suzuki for dozing off.
Soon, a strange transformation comes over Stanford. He begins drinking heavily and ditches his wife for an endless supply of Saki and geisha courtesy of Dr. Suzuki. His right hand changes into a sort of hairy claw. Soon, the urge to kill begins to take over Stanford’s mind. After Stanford murders a few locals, an eye appears on his shoulder. Soon, Stanford will find that two heads aren’t necessarily better than one.
The Manster is a terrible title for what is actually an interesting — albeit crude — little horror movie. Of course, “manster” is supposed to refer to a being that’s half-man and half-monster. (The film was also known as The Split which I think is a much better title.) From the beginning of the movie, I was rather surprised at how relatively explicit it was. For example, during the opening credits, one of Dr. Suzuki’s first experiments kills a woman in silhouette and blood splatters across a shōji. Later, Larry Stanford blatantly cheats on his wife with multiple geisha as well as Dr. Suzuki’s assistant, Tara (Terri Zimmern.) And the amount of alcohol casually consumed by the characters seems unusually excessive. While these things seem tame today, they were extreme for that time period.
From a technical standpoint, The Manster is very much a B-movie. It’s interesting that it was an American production with a largely Japanese crew. Its Japanese locale — unusual for a 1950s English language B-movie — gives the film a unique look and feel. It’s apparent that some effort went into the makeup effects but the limited budget hampered the execution. Stanford’s extra head looks very much like a balloon pinned to his shoulder as he runs around late in the film.
That said, I enjoyed The Manster as a curio from the drive-in days. It’s definitely full of unintentional laughs and terrible acting. On the flip-side, I admired its chutzpah and unusually mature (for the time) approach to its subject matter.
3.0 out of 5.0 stars
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