Gila!

I have not seen the original so I cannot speak on its accuracy, but as far as crappy monster movies go it was mediocre. The actual acting for this film was far above the average for the genre and the plot line wasn't terrible but it was hard to stay attentive. The movie was very slow and had a monster with very inconsistent ability. I would like to add that the way Gilla runs is absolutely hilarious. The story just continues to drag on with little to no action without a lot of immediate danger. Another very key flaw to this movie is the substantial lack of somewhat attractive women showing cleavage. As a major fan of the directors films this was overall a miss.

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.

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!

I've been disappointed lately with all the movies I've watched and that includes much of my collection of 50's sci-fi movies, most of which are B-movies. Even with the nostalgia factor factored in I haven't enjoyed them like I used to. Historically, I love big monster movies, new and old. So I decided to watch this one hoping it wouldn't disappoint... and it didn't.

The best thing about it was the soundtrack - classic 50's rock; no covers, all original artists.

The movie is very low budget with the special effects about 20 years behind the times but they are serviceable. A plus for the ancient CGI in this movie is that sometimes it's used cleverly, I won't give any spoilers but the old maxim holds true here "it's not what you got but how you use it".

The actors are hit and miss, some are competent and others marginal. The plot... your basic rebel teens help save a small town from an environmentally overgrown lizard. The dialog is surprisingly intelligent and clever and a much higher cut above low budget movies.

The bottom line is if you like 50's sci-fi and big monster movies then give it a look.

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.