Originally shot as part of a double feature for Dallas drive-in theater chain owner Gordon McLendon, The Giant Gila Monster is a long, tiring creature feature bereft of any energy or excitement. It revolves around a small town that discovers evidence of a 70-foot poisonous lizard wreaking havoc in the countryside. But there are two things you should know about this "giant lizard." First, the movie never really explains where it came from or how it got that big. One day...there's just a giant lizard! Second, this movie was so cheap that they didn't even use special effects. They simply took a real-life lizard, placed it in shrunken scenery, and spliced footage of it into the film. The most memorable scene involves the lizard destroying what is obviously a toy model train. But anyhow, the townsfolk can't sit by and let a giant lizard destroy everything. Unfortunately, the only people who believe that the lizard even exists are the local teenagers. When the lizard tries to attack a local sock hop, one of the teenagers, Chase Winstead, stops it by filling his hot rod with nitroglycerin and using it as a bomb. There, I gave away the ending. Now you don't have to watch it. If you feel upset that I ruined the film for you, then relax. In reality, I just saved you from an achingly tedious movie experience. Most of the film involves different teenagers and police officers talking to each other. That's it. Just talking. The "giant lizard" is only in the film for a couple of minutes. The Giant Gila Monster is a dreadful film, even by drive-in theater standards.
4/10
The Giant Gila Monster was surprisingly boring for a monster movie. The Blob did the whole "teenagers figure out how to defeat the monster thing" a year earlier and a lot better. But this MST3K was fun, I liked the host segment with Joel and the bots in malt shop.
ReplyDeleteI dunno...this was one of the rare MST3K episodes where I felt like the riffing didn't save the movie watching experience. This was just a painful movie.
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