The project was the brainchild of director Bill Rebane, and began filming in 1961 under the title Terror at Half Day. Inspired by the success of the drive-in pictures made by Roger Corman for American International Pictures, Rebane decided, in his own words, "to create a screenplay that would have some timeliness and exploitation values."

He funded the production with ten thousand dollars of his own money, and combined it with fifty thousand from two other investors: Fred Friedloeb (brother of Hollywood producer Burt Friedloeb) and actress June Travis (who appears in the film).

Rebane almost convinced a Hollywood icon to star in the picture. In an undated interview with Bill Coleman, Rebane recalled, "During pre-production and casting of the picture, I was hanging out on Randolph Street one rainy day in Chicago with my associate and press agent with a lot of guts: Larry Leverett. We were late to some meeting so we were rushing, and practically ran over this other trench-coated man also rushing to get under the marquee and out of the downpour. The trench coat-wearing man happened to be Ronald Reagan. Larry and I had few inhibitions in those days. Subsequently we blurted out the whole concept of Terror at Half Day to Ronald Reagan, standing there together under the marquee of the Woods Theater. We not only recited a synopsis but made sure to tell Ronald Reagan that June Travis was committed to the picture and that he would be the perfect star for our picture...He wanted to see a script and asked us to work out the deal with his agent whose name he carefully wrote on a pad of paper for us. He said that if we could work it out he might be interested."

Ultimately, Reagan did not appear in the film. If he had, Monster A-Go Go would no doubt have, by the 1980s, become a household word. "What made this such an extraordinary experience, never to be forgotten by myself, is that the man while in the twilight of his acting career but destined to be the president of our country had no problems standing for about ten minutes with total strangers on a Chicago sidewalk to talk about a possible role in yet another B movie."

The biggest star in Monster A-Go Go (pun intended) turned out to be Henry Hite (1915-1972). Rebane remembered, "Now, it so happened that at that time I knew the tallest man in the world, quite well. Henry Hite, of the vaudeville act Lowe, Hite and Stanley." Born Henry Mullens, he adopted a stage name that would better emphasize his height. He made a career of personal appearances, capitalizing on his extraordinary height. Hite claimed to be 8'2", but in actuality stood just over 7' 6". Rebane found that Hite, "made a perfect monster without elaborate special effects or prosthetics."

Some prosthetics were used to give the actor's face a properly monstrous appearance. However, these pasty globs only appear in some scenes.

Unfortunately, Rebane was only able to film a portion of the script when the production ran out of funds. The footage languished for several years until, circa 1964, it fell into the hands of indie filmmaker Herschell Gordon Lewis. Rebane had worked for Lewis's commercial studio, "as a kid doing part-time sales in 1959." In fact, Rebane had been inspired to undertake Terror at Half Day after watching Lewis independently shoot the risqué feature The Prime Time (1960) in Chicago.

In 1964, Lewis completed Moonshine Mountain, a bootlegging car-chase drama aimed at the Southern sh*t-kicking drive-in market. This very specialized genre had been popularized by Robert Mitchum's Thunder Road (1958), which was a perennial favorite on the circuit. Because double bills were de rigeur in the drive-in domain, Lewis needed to pair Moonshine Mountain with a second film if he wanted to squeeze the most possible mileage out of his knock-off. Lewis explained, "In that period, if you didn't have a second feature, the distributor would throw in another second feature and claim to each producer that that picture was the second half, then pay $25 flat instead of a percentage. I wanted to make sure that I controlled the play, so I always had two pictures coming out together." Lewis improvised his own second feature by patching together the remnants of Terror at Half Day.

"There wasn't much of a movie, no climax or anything," Lewis recalled, "so I turned it into a parody called Monster A-Go Go and used it as a second half with Moonshine Mountain."

Sources disagree on the amount of input Lewis had into Monster A-Go Go -- whether he shot additional footage or merely re-edited Rebane's footage and tied it together with new narration. This history of the film is written with the assumption that Lewis did in fact shoot new material, with the understanding that it may not be 100% accurate.

To the best of his limited ability, Lewis fleshed out the man-who-fell-to-earth drama with dashes of sex, rock'n'roll, and comedy, whose tonal shifts only made the film more difficult to comprehend. As if throwing up his hands on the whole affair, Lewis then overlaid the film with Twilight Zone-style ruminations that challenge the viewer to puzzle out the plot. It begins with the statement, "What you are about to see may not even be possible within the narrow limits of human understanding." And only gets more confusing from there.

Herschell Gordon Lewis's name does not appear in the credits of Monster A-Go Go. Instead, he uses the moniker Sheldon S. Seymour, and is credited as producer, as well as providing additional dialogue (Lewis also voices the narration). Lewis later employed the S.S.S. moniker for the films Something Weird (1967), Suburban Roulette (1968), and Miss Nymphet's Zap-In (1970), among others.

Monster A-Go Go eventually reached the drive-in screens in 1965. According to contemporary film/video critic Shane Dallmann, "the film received precious little (if any) theatrical play anywhere else, and didn't get much more attention when it surfaced as an obscure home video release in the 1980s."

by Bret Wood

SOURCES:
Interview with Bill Rebane:
http://www.bijouflix.com/innerviews/rebane_interview1.htm
Detailed plot description:
http://www.agonybooth.com/recaps/Monster_A_Go_Go_1965.aspx