"Tara, he's exactly the type I need! Besides, this is for science - for human knowledge! What happens to one man doesn't make any difference. You didn't seem to care for the others, Tara."
"I forgot how to care about anybody a long time ago."
Yet another movie that I first came across in the pages of Alan Frank's mundanely-titled-for-a-great-book Horror Films (Hamlyn, 1977: go seek out a copy), I was intrigued as a kid both by the amusing title ("He's a man, see, but he's also a monster!") and the large monochrome photographic still used to illustrate it. What was my young mind to make of this bizarre spectacle of a sort of simian Zaphod Beeblebrox throttling an Asian man? What was this two-headed hominid? Why was it?
Some kind of Manster, I expect.
Long before Anthony M. Lanza's The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant (1971) and the following year's double-dunced blaxploitation class ic The Thing with Two Heads from Lee Frost of Love Camp 7 infamy came The Manster. Director George Breakston had previously made such films as 1951's Tokyo File 212 and Oriental Evil and 1952's Geisha Girl on Japan and returned to the Land of the Rising Sun to shoot this film based upon his own original story The Split - under which title the film would see release in the UK in a slightly edited version with a run time of 67 minutes as opposed to the US 72-minute version.
As well as a mostly Japanese crew and supporting cast - including Satoshi 'Yetsu' Nakamura as the mad scientist Dr Robert Suzuki, Nakamura having already appeared for Breakston in both Tokyo File 212 and Geisha Girl - the movie also had an international lead cast including , in the lead man-into-monster role of the doomed Larry Stanford, Anglo-Canadian actor Peter Dyneley who would go on to be best remembered as the voice of Jeff Tracy in Gerry Anderson's supermarionation classic Thunderbirds (ITC, 1965-1966) as well as it's film spin-offs Thunderbirds Are Go (David Lane, 1966) and Thunderbird 6 (Lane, 1968), as well as having a supporting role in John Kruse's claustrophobic character-based thriller October Moth in 1960, a film i've previously taken a look at here: http://psychtronickinematograph.blogspot.com/2015/09/october-moth-1960-john-kruse.html . Making this a soon-to-be family affair, cast in the role of Stanford's long-suffering wife Linda was actress Jane Hylton (who has a long and varied career including taking over from Hazel Court as the second incarnation of Jane Huggett in Here Come the Huggetts [Ken Annakin, 1958] and as Queen Guinevere in ITC's swashbuckling William Russell vehicle The Adventures of Sir Lancelot [1956-1957], as well as being the mother - with her first husband Euan Lloyd, of the actress Rosalind Lloyd: Queen Xanxia aka 'the Nurse' in Douglas Adams' 1978 Doctor Who story 'City of Death' as well as playing Gail in Norman J. Warren's 1981 "let's push it a bit further than Alien did" SF horror Inseminoid). After meeting on the set of The Manster, Dyneley and Hylton would marry - making this almost a family affair - only to sadly pass away within eighteen months of each other in August 1977 and February 1979 respectively.
Opening with what appears to be an attack on a young woman by a crazed gorilla (so far, so Ray 'Crash' Corrigan in his monkey suit from innumerable B-movies and serials of the '30s and '40s), we are soon introduced to the volcanic mountainside laboratory of Dr Suzuki (Nakamura) where he is engaged in bizarre experimentation relating to human evolution and the periodic genetic mutations that can accelerate the evolutionary process. Having already tested his theory on his own brother Genji (Kenzo Kuroki in the ape costume) and devolved him to his current primaeval Gigantopithecus-style state, as well as turning his wife Emiko (Toyoko Takechi) into a malformed and befanged thing that he keeps locked up like the mutated cast-offs in the Delabres' barn in Curse of the Fly (Don Sharp, 1965), Suzuki plans to test his formula on a new subject. The guinea pig presents itself in the shape of American reporter Larry Stanford (Dyneley getting a chance to utilise his North American accent).
Stanford is there to interview Suzuki about his somewhat radical new theories, but after a short confab finds himself spiked in more ways than one: his Mickey Finned whisky swiftly followed by a hypodermic chaser. After returning to his head office in Tokyo to chat with his chief Ian Matthews (Norman Van Hawley, a likeable presence in his sole movie appearance) - presumably the Perry White-cum-J. Jonah Jameson of this American newspaper in Japan (let's call it The Daily Gaijin) - Stanford expresses his relief that his term in the East is almost over and that he will soon be returning Stateside to his wife Linda. Things soon take a turn, however, as further meetings with Dr Suzuki see Larry lured into a whole new world for him of geisha evenings and visits to the hot baths with Suzuki's seductive assistant, the mysterious and alluring Tara (Terri Zimmern, another sole acting credit - a shame, as she brings a lot to the part of a woman tinged with regret and determined not to return to a secretive sordid past).
Suzuki's efforts to bring out the animal in him certainly work, as Matthews finds himself unable to wrap his head around the fact that his reliable employee has in the course of days become a drunken, violent and lustful Mr Hyde seeking the pleasures of the fleshpots of Tokyo. When Larry returns from his latest raucous assignation with Tara to find his long lost Linda (Hylton) in his apartment he reacts by raging like a cornered beast instead of the contriteness of a man caught in an affair.
"You married me. You knew I was a foreign correspondent!"
"I know, " replies his injured party of a wife, "but I figured one day you could settle down...."
"Settle down?!?" he seethes and spits. "That's a grand way to put it. To settle down like mud in a pond! Bridge on Wednesdays, cocktails Thursdays, PTA Fridays? I can't give you that kind of stuff, Linda. Go home, and find someone else."
The manifold manifestations of his inner Manster go much further than a Neanderthal attitude and temper, however, as Larry finds his right hand taking on a distinctly anthropoid aspect - all gnarled and sprouting hair in a not at all bad lap dissolve sequence - but also his shoulder is becoming a problem, first a painful lump and then (in one of a couple of sequences in the film that I cannot believe Sam Raimi did not see before filming 1992's Army of Darkness) an eye. As he finds himself unable to keep resisting his violent side that his ego can't override, Larry goes out killing. After wandering into a Shinto temple and finding himself terrified by the monstrous visages of the oni demons depicted upon the temple walls, he butchers the lone priest kneeling in prayer there.
Returning to the seductive Tara (I guess the lust for the yoni is as strong as the oni), he almost attempts to confess:
"It was like a dream... or sort of a nightmare. Only I don't know where the dream stopped and the real thing began."
Like a previous cursed Larry (a certain Mr Talbot, of Llanwelly, Wales), Stanford finds himself becoming a murderous creature but unable to stop the process. Finally, the full change takes hold and Stanford not only takes on an apelike countenance but finds himself, like Richard E. Grant, discovering How to Get a Head in Advertising (Bruce Robinson, 1989) as another even more monstrous head sprouts from his right shoulder before he continues his reign of terror.
"Larry Stanford is going through the metamorphosis" Suzuki tells the remorseful and now-reluctant Tara. "This is his new self - actually a different species of man... A species that's never walked the Earth before!"
Seeking out Suzuki in his mountainous eyrie of a laboratory, the Manster (George Wyman, rather than Dyneley on monster duties) fulfils the Oedipal urge of every modern Promethean by destroying his creator, before undergoing the titular 'Split' as Larry and his primitive half actually tear apart, like cross between Ash Williams in a windmill and Clark Kent in a car-breaker's yard. After the beast-no-longer-within his attacked Tara and thrown her into the broiling depths of the active volcano, Larry does the honours by hurling his half-human half into said caldera. And so into the mountain he falls, like Varney the vampire (ooh, spoilers for 1847!) and Larry is taken away by the police for the carnivorous lunar activities of his altered state as Ian comforts Linda by delivering the usual anti-scientific progress "didn't reckon upon Gahhhd" spiel required of Fifties monster movies:
"There was good in Larry, and there was evil. The evil part broke through, took hold. Call it an accident, or call it a warning... I'm a reporter, not a mystic, Linda, but there are things beyond us - things perhaps we're not meant to understand... Have faith, Linda. Have faith in the good that's still in Larry. And in all men."
Pffftt. #NotAllMen.
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