Giant Gila Monster, The (1959)

• Directed by Ray Kellogg
• Written by Jay Simms
• Starring
  • Don Sullivan
  • Fred Graham
  • Lisa Simone
  • Shug Fisher
  • Bob Thompson
• Produced by Ken Curtis and B.R. McLendon
• Executive produced by Gordon McLendon

Director Ray Kellogg made his living through the ‘50s as a special effects supervisor. The Giant Gila Monster and its double-bill partner, The Killer Shrews, were Kellogg’s first directorial efforts, and he stuck with what he knew: cheap special effects. The story of The Giant Gila Monster is credited to Kellogg; the screenplay, though, is credited to Jay Simms, who went from his initial credits on this and The Killer Shrews to a two-decade career of writing mostly for episodic TV (though he also threw features like Creation of the Humanoids (1962) and Panic in the Year Zero! (1962) in there). I have no facts to support my supposition, but it seems self-evident to me that the lackluster parts of this movie — the unexciting miniature work to make the gila monster (actually a Mexican beaded lizard) seem huge, the pedestrian camera work, the generic storyline — came from Kellogg, and the better-than-the-baseline parts — to wit, a script which fills out the director’s story credit with fairly good dialogue — came from Simms.

“I think you got the wrong casting call, Pops.”

The setting is an isolated New Mexico town, where Sheriff Jeff (Fred Graham) is the only peace officer for 10,000 square miles. (He’s also a little shaky on the definition of “sheriff,” since he speaks of “headquarters” several times as if he were simply a posted officer for a larger police force instead of the county’s elected lawman.) The other inhabitants of the town are largely hot-rodding teeny-boppers, the kind that wouldn’t look out of place in classic Archie comics; they call everybody “Dad,” and their most anti-social pursuit is the occasional drag race on the deserted roads out of town. The first couple we see out on Lover’s Lane doesn’t even kiss; they just sit there contentedly in the car, until something mysterious pushes them over the edge into the wash!

The de facto leader of the teen “gang” (a word that has suffered definition creep in the intervening years, as they’re a bunch of cleancut guys in collared shirts who address their elders as “sir”) is Chase Winstead (Don Sullivan, last seen around here in The Monster of Piedras Blancas (1959)), who’s about as upstanding as they come; since his father died in an industrial accent, he’s been supporting his mother and crippled little sister by working at the garage. Just to show you how tightly-knit this little town is, Chase’s father had been working for Mr. Wheeler (Bob Thompson), the county’s bigwig, who’s son is now considered “missing” because his was the car we saw in the opening scene going over the embankment. Wheeler is also the sponsor for French exchange student Lisa (Lisa Simone), who’s become Chase’s main squeeze. I think the only way this town could be webbed any more tightly is if inbreeding were involved.

“Stick with it, Chase, and you too can have an exciting and fulfilling career in law enforcement.”

Because Chase’s work duties involve towing with the wrecker, he’s on hand just about every time as the Sheriff discovers another and yet another car that have mysteriously been wrecked — no sign of another vehicle to collide with, but the cars have skidded off the road and been hammered, and their occupants have disappeared. The giant gila monster really has a thing about motor vehicles, I guess. And yes, we see the gila monster early and frequently, although the main characters don’t; it waddles around unconvincing miniature sets, hissing in slow-motion. Because there isn’t enough budget for split screen or rear-screen projection, most of the interaction between the gila monster and the human cast comes in the form of barely-adequate editing that fails to convince us that the two are in the same place and sometimes even obscures what we’re supposed to understand has happened. (Thank goodness that black and white film stock lends at least some minimum of visual continuity between the full-sized exterior shots and the studio-made miniatures.)

Because calling it The Close-to-the-Camera Gila Monster wasn’t going to work.

Expanding the story out to feature length is another subplot about Chase wanting to be a rock-and-roll star. He tows the car of a drunk DJ from the city (Ken Knox, a real DJ who worked for one of the stations owned by Gordon McLendon, who financed the movie), and the DJ hears him rockin’ and boppin’ as he pounds out dents in the fender. Chase also sings a long and tedious children’s song for his little sister Missy (Janice Stone), who’s just gotten braces and begun to walk again; that song is repeated, in its drawn-out entirety complete with mini-banjo accompaniment, near the end. Given that both songs were also composed by Don Sullivan, I’m going to guess that he wanted to use this movie to help propel him into a second career as a rock’n’roll singer, forcing Simms to add that storyline. (How well did it work? When was the last time you heard Don Sullivan on your oldies radio station?)

“If I’m going to sing some more, I guess I’d better do it before your legs heal and you can run away.”

Between the run-of-the-mill plot points that mostly revolve around the sheriff discovering another wrecked car, there are slight touches to the script that make you think that, by golly, Simms was going to do a good job here. Little things like the Sheriff asking Chase if he knew whether the missing boy and his girlfriend were in any “trouble,” or Chase taking parts off the wrecked cars for his own jalopy with the Sheriff’s winking approval. It’s just enough quality to know that Simms was a better writer than the blanks he was forced to fill on this script; I see in him a kindred spirit to Benjamin Carr.

Things never really come to a head on any of the plotlines. In the dramatic storyline, Wheeler forces the Sheriff to go to arrest Chase (he never did like that boy) in Chase’s moment of musical triumph at the barn dance, but before the Sheriff can get close, the gila monster attacks — a gila monster which Chase and the Sheriff only figured out existed five minutes before in the monster storyline. The climax is even more unbelievable than the premise of a giant gila monster itself, in that it involves driving four jugs of nitroglycerin in a rattly old jalopy across a plowed field and not having them blow up until wanted.

“Heeeere’s Johnny!”

Between the obligatory requirements (a story that would exhibit the “giant” gila monster interacting with miniature sets but no human cast members, and a star-massaging musical subplot), the movie is a marginally competent little thing. But nothing in it really cries out to be seen.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 4
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 2
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0