Gila!

GILA! Opens with the death of a young couple by the rampaging beast of the title.

Enter Chase Winstead (Brian Gross), and his fellow 25 year old "teen" hotrod enthusiasts. In keeping with the original GIANT GILA MONSTER, these "kids" are engaged in harmless hijinks, until the creature starts eating them.

In this update, there's an actual reason given for the lizard's large size. Not-so surprisingly, toxic waste is to blame.

Director Jim Wynorski shows great restraint, as he omits his usual nudity and violence (no boobulars are unveiled, and the CGI blood just isn't that revolting). As for the CGI Gila itself, well, it's serviceable enough, though it does suffer from a clunky walk.

What sets this movie apart from other computer-generated monster epics is its sense of humor. It also wears its low budget proudly, featuring a sheriff with the cheapest, most oddly-fitting hat in existence!

Co-stars the awesome Kelli Maroney as Wilma. Fans of the first film will see Don Sullivan himself if they don't blink!...

A choo choo train and a big lizard or two or three and an exclamation point in the title. Some 35 year old teenagers and some really good special effects make for a great movie. They could not get Matt Damon or Justin Bieber so they went with what's his name and the guy from the movie about the thing.

The monster is well done with CGI or whatever. Some great old rock and roll fifties hit songs and lots of very nice vintage cars. The steam locomotive looks legit but I do not know.

In one scene there is a map of where the monster might be. It has a golf club called The Legends marked on the map. If you search that it is in Indiana.

The story is very lame but it remains fun until the end when a last laugh awaits the audience.

Looks like the budget was under one million so they did a good job giving us a potential cult flick for pennies. It usually costs much more to make something like this.

It has a jeep but it needs an airplane and maybe a military officer and a cat.

Right, well truth be told, then I wasn't really harboring much of any expectations to the 2012 TV movie "Gila!". Wait, let me correct myself here; I was not harboring any expectations at all.

So why watch the movie? Well, simply because I had the opportunity to do so and because I hadn't seen the movie before. So I opted to give writers William Dever, Steve Mitchell, Jim Nielsen and Paul Sinor the benefit of the doubt.

The storyline in "Gila!" was fairly straight forward. I mean, you know you're not in for an evening of Shakespearian cinema when you sit down to watch a movie such as this. But in all fairness, then the storyline was actually fair enough for a movie such as this.

Now, hold on, I am not saying that "Gila!" is a good movie. Because it most certainly wasn't a good movie. Nay, "Gila!" is one of those creature feature movies that is so bad that it is actually sort of oddly enjoyable to watch. I kept hanging around for the entire 91 minutes to watch what laughable effects was coming up next.

The acting performances in the movie were a mixed bag of nuts. Some of the performances were adequate for a movie such as this, while others were somewhat cringeworthy to behold. The only familiar face on the screen here was Terence Knox, as I had seen him in the "Tour of Duty" series back when I was a teenager.

Visually then "Gila!" is a horrible movie. Hard to comprehend how such laughably bad CGI effects made it to a movie, even back in 2012. The CGI in "Gila!" looks like something straight out of an early 1990s computer game. But it was these horrible CGI effects that actually kept me sticking around to finish watching the movie.

If you enjoy creature features, then I wouldn't exactly recommend that you sit down to watch "Gila!", not unless you have a thing for really, really bad CGI effects.

My rating of "Gila!" lands on a three out of ten stars.

The acting was horrible, the special effects were horrible, the plagiarism of the original was horrible. Only good things about this film were seeing the old cars and finding out that Don Sullivan (Chase in the original) is still above-ground.

Seriously, I love bad monster movies - things like Killer Shrews, the Giant Claw, and the Beast of Hollow Mountain. I love newer campy monster movies, too, but this was just a complete waste of time.

If you want to watch a movie about a giant lizard and have seen Lake Placid too many times, then watch the original Giant Gila Monster from 1959. The acting (for the most part) is much better, they used a live lizard and miniatures (so there's no awful CGI), and hey, it's original, not plagiarized!

Good slick remake of a classic '50's b-movie, brings memories back in color. I recall all the kids there and the smell of popcorn, hoots and hollers, just a nice relaxing afternoon at the movies without supervision.