The Giant Gila Monster

Well... maybe I'm in strong like.

The Giant Gila Monster is undeniably idiotic, but it is also a thoroughly enjoyable fusion of stereotypes - the '50s sci-fi craptacular, the 1950s teen rebel film complete with really sexy hot rods and a modern day Tex-western - all genres well overdue for retro movements.

The film features some of the most inept special effects of all time, vast continuity chasms, and shockingly good characterization. Regardless of how sub-cretinous the script sometimes becomes, the characters are actually well developed human beings with interesting relationships to one another - united by their existence in a town where nothing interesting ever happens, until a giant gila monster starts terrorizing a long, lonely stretch of highway on the outskirts of town.

Don Sullivan is likable but sickeningly sweet as the bad-boy Texas drag racer turned responsible budding good-boy rock-a-billy star. His acting is not too bad, and some of the rest of cast act as well, but generally, the performances are a bit ridiculous. Nevertheless, the film really does develop its characters and its plot in somewhat unique and original ways. And besides, when you're not being entertained by the virtual variety show which passes by between the action scenes, you can laugh at the tonka toys getting walked on, the flaming toy train, and the giant sand grains (almost as large as the grain of salt you should take this film with) that appear near the camera in most of the scenes featuring the gila monster.

If films are supposed to entertain, this will certainly satisfy fans of pulpy sci-fi like me. I can't honestly recommend it for those who do not enjoy camp and kitsch. Enjoy!

When I was a kid in the early 1960s, this movie came on TV and I watched it with my mother. She said she was an extra in the scene where the dance hall is torn down by the monster. There's a fairly good shot of her for a second or two.

She told me that Don Sullivan hit on her. Not bad for a mother of 4. When he asked her out, she said, "I'll have to ask my husband first", and he just walked away.

I know this film is bad. I know the gila monster is nothing more than a live one put on the ground with some miniature trucks, cars, buildings, and even a train. I know the acting is overall very poor. The script is full of holes, and the special effects are not special. But I really like this film overall. What this film DOES have is a whole lot of heart. The story deals with people missing in a very small town. The sheriff(played very nicely by Fred Graham) is pressured by the local industrialist to find his son that has been missing. Where does the lawmen go for help? Well, he goes to a teenager that happens to work at a local garage, drive a souped up hot-rod, sing rock and roll in his spare time, and is a swell guy in general. Don Sullivan plays the young man, and I think he is actually pretty good. Sure, the film is hokey. What film wouldn't be with a title like The Giant Gila Monster? But this film is more than your typical B science fiction film of the 50's. It really tries hard to create characters rather than just stereotypes. There are scenes that you just would not find in your average teen science fiction flick. The scene where Chase sings to his crippled sister is just one example. This film was produced by Festus..I mean Ken Curtis who also had his hand in that other fun, campy science fiction film of the same year The Killer Shrews.

I had a pretty positive reaction to this movie, although my opinion is surely biased because I saw it a couple days after watching the 2003 film Coronado and I was still reeling at how staggeringly bad that movie was. Unbelievable, seriously. I'm not going to get over that shock for quite a while, actually. The Giant Gila Monster is an example of a classic b-monster movie with ridiculous dialogue and dismal special effects that still manages to be entertaining. A lot of reviewers have had a lot of really negative things to say about it, which I'm trying to avoid because it's really easy to badmouth a movie like this.

I bought a collection of 50 classic horror films and this one was included and, on the inside flap of the box is the following line, presumably meant to generate excitement in seeing the movie, "Marvel at the primitive special effects in Giant Gila Monster!" This is partly why I try to avoid bashing the movie too much, because it came in a collection of movies called "50 Horror Classics," which also includes such gems as Attack of the Giant Leeches, The Killer Shrews (which was originally released as a double feature with The Giant Gila Monster), Swamp Women, and The Amazing Mr. X. Surely I was not expecting a milestone film when I watched this movie, although it should be noted that the collection also features films like Nosferatu, Night of the Living Dead, House on Haunted Hill, Metropolis, The Phantom of the Opera, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and White Zombie (which I have yet to watch, but with a title like that it HAS to be good).

The premise of the movie is that there is so much uncharted land around some suburban town that a monstrous lizard has been living there unnoticed for years. The movie starts out showing normal daily life of a lot of teenagers acting like I assume teenagers really acted back then (if someone tried it these days, however, they would have to have their wedgies surgically removed), until strange things start happening in the form of lots of car crashes that involve skidmarks perpendicular to the direction of travel, resulting in the big question, "What batters a car around like it was a toy?"

For most of the movie the cast dances around the possibility of any unusual life forms until the father of a boy who went missing early in the film insists that there could be a huge lizard out there, giving reasoning which makes absolutely no sense at all. He insists that a giant lizard could easily live out there for years unnoticed, get this, in the "underbrush." Well, maybe he just didn't understand the scale he was talking about, because given the size of the car that crashes into it at the end of the film, this lizard living in "underbrush" was probably a good 60 feet long. But even without having seen the thing, is "underbrush" the kind place where something big enough to push cars sideways could hide?

The size of the lizard, first of all, is blamed on out of control pituitary growth, then soon afterwards there's something about some river delta country where salts washed into the valley and got absorbed by the plants and then transferred to the animal, causing them to be giant. I don't know if the intention was to throw in some scientific processes and quickly confuse the audience, but I really can't say that I've heard of any salts that cause gigantism. But I'm no scientist, so what do I know.

At any rate, yes the special effects are primitive, but so is the movie. This is a special effects film that was made on a tiny budget more than four decades ago, so I'm willing to cut a little slack. The gila monster is never convincing even for a second, but at least there was some genuine thought put into the characters and the script. One of the biggest signposts of low budget science fiction and horror is when you can't tell how big the monster is, but remember that that is a sign of low budget, not low quality. I like to think that The Gian Gila Monster has at least some quality.

The movie, for example, contains at least one clever line of dialogue ("I ask you what time it is and you tell me how to build a clock, just answer the question!") and the singing that one of the main characters is always doing (as well as his disabled daughter) were genuine, and successful, in my opinion, efforts at creating three-dimensional characters, which is not something that you see often in these old monster movies. Or new monster movies, as it were.

Again, I may be being overly tolerant of this movie because I watched Coronado recently and I remain blown away at how god-awful it was, but while The Giant Gila Monster will never become a classic of any kind (no matter what kind of movie collection it is included with), it is certainly not as bad as so many people would have

As an offering on AMC's Friday Fright Night, this film hardly qualified, other than being frightfully nostalgic and silly...but after ample quantities of Labatts and Yukon Jack, I thought this flick was big fun.

Okay, so that ukelele should've been broken over the dude's head the minute he started strumming it; so his crippled yet perky little sister was badly in need of an upper-lip wax; and I won't even reference the titular monster, as it's been commented on ad infinitum...

This is classic "ancient" cinema, the stuff your parents were supposed to be watching while they steamed up the windows in the back seat of your daddy's Plymouth; and I still think it beats the CGI "blockbusters" being pooped out of Hollywood every year.

To paraphrase Geena Davis in that remake of another cheesy sci-fi flick: "Be drunk...Be VERY drunk!" Highly recommended at 4 in the morning...