The Giant Gila Monster

Enjoyed viewing this old time classic film with the old Hot Rod cars of the 1930's with rumble seats and the 1959 Dodge car which the Sheriff (Fred Graham),"Mom & Boy",'72 was able to acquire from his town. Don Sullivan(Chase Winstead),"The Rebel Set",'59 helped the Sheriff try to solve all the strange happens with people and their cars, especially their Hot Rod leader. Lisa Simone(Lisa),"Missile to the Moon",'58 added some romance to this black and white film. This is one of the films that were made during the period when Monsters were animated and then magnified because of the low budget the film producers had to work with. A few of these pictures that followed this same procedure were: "Attack of the Crab Monsters",'57 and "The Black Scorpion",'57. If you like old classic films from the late 1950's this is a film to view and 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.

The Giant Gila Monster is another creature feature from Ray Kellogg (The Killer Shrews) that usually gets passed over with bad reviews. The story is about a giant, people-eating gila monster, which usually lurks in the thick brush near an isolated community. The main character, Chase Winston, (Don Sullivan) is a teen leader, car mechanic, and rockabilly/folk singer who sort of reminds me of singer Jimmie Rodgers. The acting is fine to passable for this type of low-budget movie, and the film is well shot. The Giant Gila Monster may be too slow for younger audiences used to today's action-packed fare, but for older audiences it might be a fun reminder of the era in which it was made. The music is creepy and nicely captures the mood of the isolated areas. The special effects (like the gila monster attacking a wrecked train) may bring on some good laughs. Throw in some rock & roll, teen lingo, a French exchange student (Lisa Simone, who was also in Missile To The Moon), a big city disc jockey, and some hot rods, and you've got a late 50's, drive-in flick which can be easily enjoyed for the type of movie it is.

"The Giant Gila Monster" is one of those films of old that despite its numerous flaws retains a certain charm that adds a special mystique to the experience of watching them. Often labeled as one of the movies with worst special effects in history of cinema, this small Drive-In classic shines among similar movies due probably to the same naiveté that made Ed Wood's movies legendary. Like Wood's movies, "The Giant Gila Monster" has more good intentions than talent behind the camera, and that probably is what makes it so special.

The plot starts when people starts disappearing in the roads near a small Texan town. The sheriff Jeff (Fed Graham) is puzzled by the case as the victims seem to vanish leaving no trace. With the aid of his good friend Chase (Don Sullivan), he starts an investigation that will lead them to discover that a monster of huge proportions has been hiding and is eating its victims.

The movie is centered around Chase and the Sheriff's friendship, and the parental relationship that exists between them. Despite having no father and with a handicapped sister, Chase never loses his optimism and is willing to help everyone, from his best-friend the Sheriff to his girlfriend Lisa (Lisa Simone), who is an immigrant and wants to get a job. All this is charged with the 50s innocence and that naiveté that gives the film its charm.

Acordign to history, this movie was the brainchild of Gordon McLendon, a Texan millionaire who wanted to make movies with good Christian values and moral lessons to fight against the movies that were "corrupting" the youngsters of his time. This purpose is notorious through the film as the victims of the monster seem to be punished because of their sins, and becomes blatantly obvious when Don Sullivan sings the movie's theme.

While the movie may have failed as a Christian movie, it has gained a popularity among fans of 50s B-movies because it presents the classic elements of the Atomic Age creature-features. The primitive and simple special effects and the poorly written dialogs are really obvious flaws but the film as a whole has a certain charm due probably to the innocence of its makers and probably of the 50s as a whole.

Don Sullivan is a good lead, and also performs his songs with natural ease. Fred Graham and Lisa Simone are also quite good despite the silly dialog the movie has. Director Ray Kellogg handles the movie with the typical 50s style probably to make it appealing to mainstream audiences. The special effects are indeed poor and it is easy to notice that the Giant Gila Monster is nothing more than a normal Gila Monster walking over a cheap scale model.

To judge "The Giant Gila Monster" under the standard of our times would be a mistake, so it's better to say that the film delivers entertainment and a good glimpse to the idealized society of the 50s. People expecting a classic horror movie will definitely be disappointed, but fans of Atomic Age monsters or of B-Movie classics will find a minor gem to enjoy. 5/10

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