The Giant Gila Monster (1959) Review

The Giant Gila Monster (1959) Review

 

Once upon a time, I was just a naïve little kid with a budding interest in monster movies. I stumbled across a little selection of DVDs in the most unlikely place: Canadian Tire. I perused the selection and found what I perceived at the time to be a diamond in the rough: a 3-disc Sci-Fi DVD collection that boasted in big letters at the top of the front cover “OVER 13 HOURS!” It had an assortment of films with titles that sounded great, and was only ten bucks. It was too good of a deal to pass on, and the one film that really sold me on it was The Giant Gila Monster. Here’s the description from the DVD:

“A giant Gila monster is terrorizing a small community, killing at random, knocking over barns and buildings. When the monster threatens to devour Chace Winstead’s little sister, he attempts to destroy the beast with a hot rod full of nitroglycerin.”

It wasn’t what I hoped it would be, and now, all these years later, I’m going back to the past to look at this random little movie from my childhood, as well as the concept of budget DVD sets.

I’ll cut right to the chase: The Giant Gila Monster is one of my least-favourite giant monster films. I won’t say most-hated, though, because there’s really nothing inherently hateable about it. It just disappointed me in all the ways I’d hoped it wouldn’t, and has virtually no entertainment value. The creature is nothing more than a beaded lizard rear-projected to look giant or placed on a crappy miniature set. Beaded lizards look almost the same as Gila monsters, but the main difference is Gila monsters are venomous and beaded lizards are not, so it makes sense why the filmmakers wouldn’t use a real Gila monster. The characters aren’t annoying or awful, they’re just uninteresting. Everyone is obsessed with cars and hanging out, and it’s a bore to watch them. The creature attacks are almost non-existent, and the effects are so minimalist there’s nothing to comment on. The only good part is at the very end, when they drive the car full of nitro into the lizard and blow it up. The rest is just dull dialogue scenes.

The Giant Gila Monster has, for some reason, remained a minor cult classic. I tried to watch it again recently, suspecting I was maybe too young at the time to appreciate the cheesy, outdated qualities of it, but I still can’t sit through it from beginning to end. It was filmed back-to-back with The Killer Shrews, and is similarly goofy despite taking itself seriously, except there’s so little to enjoy that I can’t recommend it on any level.

So, was I duped by this budget DVD collection of yesteryear and others like it? You bet I was. At the time, it seemed like exactly what it claimed to be: a bargain. It was way more movies per dollar than if I had bought something else, and the terrible picture quality didn’t matter that much to me at the time. I assumed old movies like The Giant Gila Monster were inevitably going to look bad, but I didn’t realize many of these DVD distributors actually used VHS transfers for the discs, meaning the picture and sound wasn’t enhanced in any way. In fact, my DVD of The Giant Gila Monster has scan lines and artifacts from the deteriorating VHS tape copied right into the movie, and now I can watch the exact same movie for free on YouTube in better quality!

With the advent of Blu-ray and streaming, many of these old crappy sci-fi/horror films were properly restored, and they look better today than ever before. I look back on budget DVD collections with a certain fondness, though. Recently the complete collection of Gamera films was released on Blu-ray, all restored to the highest possible picture and sound quality, all unedited and complete with bonus features, which is pretty cool, but nothing can top my excitement of first buying the Giant Monsters Collection, which had nearly all the Gamera films spread over three discs, along with a few other giant monster movies. The movies were all in full screen, with horrible dubbing, footage edited out (which I didn’t know at the time), and those were the only versions available back then. Budget DVD sets are still around, mainly containing public domain genre flicks, but as an older, wiser film fan, I know better now.