The Giant Gila Monster

Poster tagline: ONLY HELL COULD BREED SUCH AN ENORMOUS BEAST! ONLY GOD COULD DESTROY IT! Slightly more acceptable than Kellogg's The Killer Shrews (both films were screened in one evening for one ticket, a fairly common occurrence for short B-movies in the 1950s). Maybe, what prevents it to be a total dud is the likeable lead actor, or maybe it's the three quite nice songs or the more varied visuals. In any case, the special effects are also terrible, and there aren’t any, basically. The shots of the "real monster" (a lizard scurrying among miniatures) are spliced with the real shots in the film. Sometimes they fit together quite well, sometimes not at all, and overall it looks unintentionally comical, and the interactions with live characters, even with rear projections, are simply inexistent. They saved money were they could, it seems. (04/01/2013)

There is one lizard crawling around a scaled-down model of landscape, one latex claw, and a couple of amateur actors - so there was just about enough to shoot a science-fiction horror movie about an overgrown lizard. It is therefore pretty much as dry as dust from start to finish (at times it falls heavily into being a soap opera set in a small-town) and like a formula done to death a hundred times - as soon as nitroglycerin is mentioned during the start of the movie, you can immediately comfortably predict where it will all end up - however, as a taster of low-budget 50s science-fiction B-movies it is just as one might expect. (16/11/2019)