Monster a Go-Go!
"You may come from beyond the moon,
But to me, you're just a goon!"—The Other Three, lyrics to Title Theme Tune "Monster A Go-Go!"
Director Herschell Gordon Lewis needed another movie to round out a double-feature with Moonshine Mountain. So he bought Bill (The Giant Spider Invasion) Rebane's unfinished "Terror at Halfday," added a couple of extra scenes, some new dialogue, some narration, and voila - Monster A Go-Go was born.
The plot, such as it is, is that an astronaut has gone missing after crash-landing in suburban Illinois. At the same time, a monster that looks suspiciously like the lost spaceman (and is highly radioactive) has been terrorizing teenagers and scaring the pants off of the locals. Scientists work to study the monster, but he escapes into the Chicago sewers, only to disappear suddenly. The narrator then explains that there was no monster, and that the astronaut was found "alive, well and of normal size" in the North Atlantic -- something that itself is never explained!
For the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version, please go to the episode recap page.
- Blatant Lies - Anything the narrator says.
- Cosmic Horror - Maybe? As with so many things in this movie, this is never elaborated on.
- Dreadful Musician - The composer of the actual score. To elaborate, the score consisted mainly of sparse, jangly Scare Chords played on a Fender Rhodes and amplified to distortion; it's atonal, harsh, and probably meant to be creepy, but just gets annoying after a while.
- Did Not Do the Research - Nothing works anything like this movie portrays it. Weirdly averted in that this is one of the few films where an oscilloscope gets used in a remotely realistic manner.
- Gainax Ending - There was no monster. This chain of events is also never explained properly, making what was supposed to be a Shocking Swerve turn into a huge Plot Hole.
- The Immodest Orgasm. One of the female scientists moans offscreen as if she's having an orgasm.
- Jerkass - Dr. Carl. Talks to the wife of the mission's pilot about how well a mission went when the pilot didn't come back alive, instructs a mother not to tell her son that his step-father is dead, and inexplicably disappears before doing anything useful.
- And he promised the kid they'd go out for milkshakes before vanishing while the kid is out of the room.
- Last-Name Basis - The Logan brothers.
- Mind Screw - How the climax happened is not only never explained, but handwaved by the narrator at the very end.
- Parody Retcon: H.G. Lewis claimed this movie was a parody instead of an Obvious Beta, as does the trailer. He's also claimed it to be a "satire" later on.
- Plot Hole - Plenty of them, due to the incomplete nature of the film. Very little of what's going on is explained properly, and attempts to explain it just end up posing more questions than they answer.
- Space Clothes - On the monster. Inexplicably.
- The Treachery of Images - the ending.
- What Happened to the Mouse? - About half the characters disappear about halfway into the movie. One of them, Dr. Logan, is replaced by his brother, Dr. Logan, who is the same actor with a different haircut.