Le Fantastique Homme colosse

One of my sci-fi/horror/fantasy reviews written 50 years ago: The brainchild of Bert I. Gordon, who produced, directed and co-wrote, with writer Mark Hanna, the film stars Glenn Langan, Cathy Downs and William Hudson.

The sentimental monster is created when an enlisted man grows huge after being exposed to a nuclear bomb test. When he starts creating havoc, nothing can stop him until he falls off Grand Coulee Dam.

The American-International Pictures release was photographed by Joseph Biroc, whose movies include "It's a Wonderful Life", "Bwana Devil" (the original 3-D feature) and "Blazing Saddles"!

I liked this film. I liked it a lot. Sure it is by no means anything other than a poorly-crafted, deficient special effects laden film about a man that survives a plutonium blast that starts to grow almost 8 inches a day. Soon Colonel Glenn Manning becomes fifty feet high and starts to lose his mind. Bert I. Gordon is able to do something he rarely ever does, and that is make you care a bit for the characters. Glen Manning is punished for a good deed and his heroic personality, and the irony of his situation is never lost on him or the audience. Glenn Langlan does a pretty good job as the giant man despite the acting experience it was trying to seem gigantic. The rest of the cast is not quite at his mediocre level. Cathy Downs does a credible job as his love interest, but the two fellas playing the doctors had all the bedside charm of a brick wall. How bout that scene with the camel and the elephant? What a hoot! The special effects are some of the cheapest to come out of the fifties. Giant Glenn Manning is just projected onto other film. Nothing too special about that. Except in the close-ups, the giant always looks transparent(a symptom of the projection process...watch Attack of the 50 Foot Woman and you will see the same effect). The scene with the giant hypodermic needle is easily the best. Glenn finally gets his point across to an army scientist. The biggest low of the film for me was the ending. It seems very abrupt, almost like, "Hey, we ran out of money....let's end it like this....real fast!" Shortcomings notwithstanding...give The Amazing Colossal Man a try if you like good/bad science fiction films from the fifties. If your ideas of horror classics are Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street...stay away...nothing in this film will entertain you.

Burt I. Gordon's "The Amazing Colossal Man" was the first sci-fi film I saw as a kid that actually scared me. But it wasn't the effect of a bald Col. Glenn Manning running around Las Vegas that I found frightening; it was the actual atomic bomb test-blast footage I found so horrific. At the age of six, seeing houses blown like matchsticks into blazing debris was enough to cause nightmares. The same footage (recently restored by Peter Kuran for the "explosive" documentary "Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie") can still sends shivers down the spine of any self-respecting anti-nuker.

"The Amazing Colossal Man" still ranks as one of the better b-grade drive-in movies. It is unintentionally funny, full of impossible science and very entertaining. The cast does their best with the material (from a script by George Worthing Yates) but I suspect no one took the project very seriously, least of all Mr. Gordon. It is also highlighted by another thunderous Albert Glasser score.

I have seen The Amazing Colossal Man several times and is one of Mr BIG's better movies.

As a plane crashes just before an atomic test at Camp Desert Rock, Glenn Manning goes to see if there are any survivors despite the danger. The bomb goes off and he gets caught right in the middle of the blast. He suffers 90% burns but doctors are very baffled when they take his bandages off to find him without any scars at all. Gradually, he increases in size and eventually, he goes on the rampage through Las Vagas and kills Major Lindstrom when he injects him with a formula to reduce him in size with the needle. Manning is shot by the Military and falls into the Colorado River but is not dead...

One of the better parts of the movie is where Manning kills the Major with the needle he was going to inject him with.

The cast includes Glenn Langan as Manning and 50's sci-fi regulars Cathy Downs (The She Creature), Russ Bender (It Conquered the World) and James Seay (Killers From Space). Most of the cast are used to fighting giant creatures looking at other sci-fi movies they were in at this time.

Despite the low budget, this movie was fun to watch.

Rating: 3 stars out of 5.

1957's "The Amazing Colossal Man" was director's Bert I. Gordon's debut and most financially successful release for American International Pictures, while also his most acclaimed, not too surprising once you realize that virtually none of his other giant size creatures had any personality, neither "The Cyclops" nor the sequel "War of the Colossal Beast" giving their menace any dialogue. The simple inversion of Universal's massive hit "The Incredible Shrinking Man" was actually an uncredited adaptation of Homer Eon Flint's brief 1928 novel "The Nth Man," the rights to which just happened to belong to James H. Nicholson, and may have also inspired Stan Lee's origin story for The Incredible Hulk! In the lead was Glenn Langan, an actor who made a name for himself the previous decade in films like "Hangover Square" and "Dragonwyck" (facing off against Vincent Price), but had fallen on hard times here but a performance that engenders sympathy for his plight despite an excess of self pity and the typically overdone excuse of radiation poisoning. Colonel Glenn Manning (Langan) readies himself for the nation's first plutonium bomb test but leaves his position of safety to try to rescue the pilot of a downed civilian plane, the flesh seared from his body by the force of the blast (a startling visage so well done it is repeated at least twice more). As 95% of his body suffered third degree burns doctors give his fiancée Carol (Cathy Downs, "The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues," "The She-Creature," "Missile to the Moon") little hope that he'll survive, yet just hours after treatment his skin has completely regenerated itself, beginning a process of growth where Dr. Paul Linstrom (William Hudson, "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman") estimates the rate to be 10 feet per day. Manning emerges from his coma in a state of shock, despair and amusement in equal measure before we learn that his heart is not growing at the same pace as the rest of his body, essentially doomed to die in a few days unless something can be done to halt the progression. There's entirely too much talk until the final reel, when the Colossal Man finally goes on the rampage through Las Vegas, while one patrolman haplessly observes: "are you gonna stand by and let him destroy property?" A giant needle makes a painful looking injection that hopefully should stunt his growth, but in his fury he impales one unfortunate medico with a devastating strike and purloins his tiny fiancée for a final date with destiny at Boulder Dam. Gordon continued making giant size creature features for another 20 years, but never again reached the heights that this picture did. There's a lot of fun to be had if one can stay patient through the slow spots, which sadly isn't the case with its perfunctory sequel.