The Giant Gila Monster (1959) **½

     I’m beginning to think Ray Kellogg may have been the most underrated director of the 1950’s. Most folks rank him among the worst of the worst, and at first glance, it’s easy enough to understand why. After all, it’s hard to take a man seriously when his two biggest claims to fame are called The Giant Gila Monster and The Killer Shrews. But upon closer examination, it seems pretty clear to me that the bad reputations of both films stem primarily from the undeniable and distractingly conspicuous lousiness of their special effects. The monsters in The Killer Shrews are dogs wearing carpets, and yeah— that’s pretty sad. You’ll get no argument from me on that score, nor will you hear me say much in defense of the HO-scale miniature work in The Giant Gila Monster. But hiding behind those hysterically sorry special effects are a pair of surprisingly solid monster flicks. That isn’t quite so much the case with this movie as it is with its companion piece (The Giant Gila Monster is further hampered by some almost painful efforts to work as a mid-50’s-style rock and roll movie), but it’s still a great deal better than I remember it being.

     The Giant Gila Monster begins with a prologue similar to those of Bert I. Gordon’s more accomplished, late-50’s movies; as we’ll be seeing later, this is only appropriate. A car speeds down a winding country road in the middle of the night, until it is suddenly knocked clear off the pavement by something huge. The huge something looms over the passengers as they try to free themselves from the wrecked vehicle, and that’s the last anybody will ever see of them.

     We may safely assume that the Mr. Wheeler (Bob Thompson) who comes around bothering the local sheriff (Fred Graham, from Panther Girl of the Congo and The Crimson Ghost) about his missing son the next day is talking about one of the people who were riding in that car. Wheeler is operating on the assumption that the boy ran off to seek trouble with his idol, hotrodder Chase Winstead (Don Sullivan, also seen in Teenage Zombies and The Monster of Piedras Blancas), but the sheriff has a different idea. For one thing, he knows that Winstead, despite his reputation, is easily the smartest, steadiest, most responsible adolescent in town. For another, he knows that the Wheeler boy’s girlfriend has also gone missing— perhaps the two of them have simply eloped? It would hardly be surprising, given both Mr. Wheeler’s dictatorial parenting style and his vocal disapproval of the relationship between his well-heeled son and the daughter of a pair of impoverished white-trash dirt-farmers. Wheeler bridles at the suggestion, but eventually shuts up and leaves the sheriff alone to do his job.

     Sheriff Jeff recognizes that Wheeler has one small particle of a point, however— that if anybody knows where the missing kids have gone, it’s Chase Winstead— and with that in mind, he goes to see Chase at Compton’s garage, where he works as a mechanic and tow truck driver. Compton himself (Cecil Hunt) is out on an errand, buying about a gallon of nitroglycerine for no apparent reason (Foreshadowing Flare! *Foomp!*), so Winstead has plenty of time to talk to the sheriff about his two younger friends. Chase honestly has no idea what might have become of either Wheeler or his girlfriend. They weren’t “in any trouble” (that is to say, they hadn’t managed to get the girl knocked up) to the best of his knowledge, and neither one said anything to him about planning on sneaking away, for any reason.

     That’s when the wrecked cars start showing up along the road that runs parallel to the old dry riverbed outside of town. The first turns out to have been stolen. Whoever pinched it must have figured the safest escape route led through the country, but then lost control of the vehicle while rounding a bend. Something about the scene of the wreck doesn’t compute, though. For one thing, the dents on the side of the car aren’t quite right; they look like they were caused by a single, huge, irregular object striking the side of the car once, rather than by a roll down the embankment, with its attendant sustained battering from stones and stumps and assorted other hazards. Not only that, the skidmarks on the pavement run perfectly straight, and perfectly perpendicular to the axis of the road. The sheriff has never once seen a skidmark like them. The second distressed vehicle isn’t a wreck, per se, but merely a close call. Local radio personality Horatio “Steamroller” Smith (Beyond the Time Barrier’s Ken Knox), driving drunk, runs off the road while attempting to dodge something rushing across it. When Chase picks him up for the tow, Steamroller tells him that whatever he was dodging was much too big for him to get a fix on its shape, but that it was a long, black thing with lots of little pink stripes. Chase understandably figures that’s just the alcohol talking, and thinks nothing more of it. Finally, the Wheeler boy’s car turns up at the bottom of the riverbed. It’s smashed up in exactly the same strange way as the first wreck was, and there’s blood on the seats. Chase, his exchange-student girlfriend, Lisa (Missile to the Moon’s Lisa Simone), and two of Winstead’s other friends search the densely wooded gully for a while, but they never do find any bodies. Luckily for them, they also don’t find the gargantuan gila monster that’s been watching them through the trees the entire time.

     The first person to do that is Harris, the town drunk (Shug Fisher). He happens to be on the scene when the monster lizard derails a train, and he tells the sheriff the whole strange story later that night. Now you might expect Jeff to laugh in Harris’s face and lock him in the drunk tank, but while he does indeed lock the man up, the sheriff doesn’t do any laughing. Not long ago, he read a story in the newspaper about a baby in Russia who grew up freakishly big, freakishly fast because of a combination of toxic chemicals in his family’s well-water, and if it could happen to a human, then why not to a gila monster too? Meanwhile, confirmation is on its way sooner than anyone wants, because Chase and his friends are throwing a big party this Saturday night at a barn not far from the monster’s lair. Between the noise and the tempting smell of all those delicious teenagers, there’s just no way the immense lizard isn’t going to gate-crash. I guess we know what that nitroglycerine was for now, don’t we?

     With The Giant Gila Monster, we sort of have two movies happening at once, and one of them is much better than the other. The famous limitations of the special effects aside, the film’s monster-movie aspects are handled quite well. Kellogg is to be commended for not falling back on the A-bomb cliché to provide his monster’s origin, and a few of the stalking scenes are unexpectedly suspenseful— the death of the hitchhiker especially so. The director also does a pretty good job convincing us that the lizard is bigger than usual, although it’s impossible to tell until the climactic attack on the lamentably cheesy barn set just how much bigger it’s supposed to be. In his role as screenwriter, Kellogg keeps his contrivances to a minimum (there’s that business with the nitroglycerine, of course, but that’s pretty much it), and he makes at least some effort to treat most of his characters more honestly and believably than was typical of the genre at the time.

     Unfortunately, when The Giant Gila Monster steps beyond the boundaries of the monster mash, things start to go wrong in a big way. Kellogg’s bids for direct teen appeal are outright embarrassing. It’s enough that Chase Winstead is portrayed as a saintly but misunderstood pseudo-hoodlum— making him a secretly aspiring rock and roll star too is really pushing it. Then Kellogg compounds the error by grossly mishandling that aspect of the plot. We only get to hear half of Chase’s swinging dance number, but his obnoxious homebrew hymn (“The Lord said, ‘Laugh, children, laugh’…”)— sung to the accompaniment of a child’s toy banjo, no less!— gets played in its entirety twice! And in an especially perverse display of youth-culture cluelessness, it’s the latter song that proves the bigger hit among Winstead’s teenage followers. I’m sorry Ray, but the current popularity of Creed and MXPX aside, that’s not how it works! In fact, the one positive thing I can think of to say about The Giant Gila Monster in its capacity as a teen movie is that Kellogg certainly seems to have a handle on the ways of hotrodders. The covetous manner in which Chase and his friends eye Old Man Harris’s 1932 Model-A Ford coupe is absolutely spot-on. But for the most part, all that clumsy teen stuff is just a misguided sideline. The Giant Gila Monster spends most of its time being exactly what it sounds like, and at that it does a pretty respectable job.

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