Another deep cut from the PD Project. I mistakenly described the film then as featuring “Giant radioactive monsters and incompetent rear-projection for the win!” The mistake is that the titular gila monster is not the product of radiation, just a result of gila monsters growing large.
No, that’s really the whole story of where the giant gila monster comes from: gila monsters can get big, so here’s one that got really big. There’s no mystery as to why or how and none of the characters wonder either.
The same depth of drama applies to every part of this film. What happens in this movie? Not a whole lot. You could say the disappearance of a young couple at the start is the inciting incident since it leads to the boy’s father tasking the sheriff with finding his son (and casting aspersion upon our hero). However, that father doesn’t return until the very end of the film (where he doesn’t seem too torn up about the likely death of his son) and our hero isn’t drawn into the mystery of where his friends have gone or what’s causing all the car accidents in the area.
In short, it’s a profoundly incurious film that begs you to be interested. But at least it has several interludes of pointless singing.
Wrap Up:
The Good: Elderly teens. This is a film from back when you had people on their third mortgages playing “the kids” and it’s just kind of funny to see suit-bound men with receding hairlines get called “kid.”
The monster. They use an actual lizard shot in close-up and have it interact with models when it needs to smash things. Unfortunately the models aren’t very impressive and the lizard doesn’t so much smash them as have to be coaxed through them.
The Bad: Very little. This would be the place to bring up the songs of Don Sullivan and make fun of the movie for featuring them, but they’re just generic examples of the music of the time. The movie’s so profoundly unambitious that it doesn’t get much wrong, but that’s only because it strives to do so little. The best films of this kind have some bonkers decision on screen—anything from an over-the-top monster to a clear display of the director’s reach exceeding their grasp—and this just has nothing.
Production note: As I say in the episode, I was originally going to show Yongary, Monster From the Deep. It’s a Korean kaiju film and it’s well past time that I feature a Korean film on the Busan Midnight Movie. When I did the copyright test of uploading all this month’s movies to YouTube to see what got flagged, Yongary came up as owned by MGM. Except for the Gamera movies, I’m not aware of any other kaiju films in the public domain so I reached for Gila Monster as a replacement. Coincidentally, this is the same thing Mystery Science Theater 3000 did when they released a box set of their show with Godzilla vs. Megalon: they didn’t have the rights for that and had to pull the sets immediately. When they reissued it, they replaced Godzilla with The Giant Gila Monster
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