Gila!

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.

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.

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.

...and unfortunately, Jim Wynorski and the SyFy channel didn't know where it was...

So this movie is set in the 1950's, which mean every character is a bad 1950's cliche. They got ahold of someone's vintage auto collection, as long as none of them appear to get wrecked, because you know anyone who owns one of these cars isn't going to wreck on for a SyFy movie.

The weakest part is the Gila Monster itself. Unlike the 1950's movie, which used an ACTUAL Gila Monster, no Gila Monsters actually were used in this film. Instead, they use some of the *worst* CGI I've ever seen. It meets the same fate. As it's 1950's counterpart.

Is there a reason for this movie. It's not funny enough to be a parody, and not lovingly referential enough to be a homage.

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!