Saturday SciFi – The Giant Gila Monster

This Saturday we bring you the 1959 “Gearhead Gangster Makes Good” monster flick, “The Giant Gila Monster.”  Directed by Ray Kellogg who also brought us “The Killer Shrews” and, oddly, “The Green Berets.” and was ubiquitous as the visual director for 20th Century Fox films throughout the late 40s, 50s and 60s.  Starring a cast of never-be’s with the dubious help of Fred “The Typecast Sheriff” Graham whose appearances in dozens of movies and TV shows remains unnoticed, to this day.

A typical tale about a teen drag-racer, auto-mechanic and secretly-responsible young citizen appropriately named Chase, who saves a typical small Southwest burg from the hell resulting from radioactive experiments! This film is an awesome mashup of the 50s two favorite film tropes, the “Teen Rebel” and “Radioactive Monster” with a French foreign-exchange student and polio-suffering younger sister, thrown in for good measure.

Get out your Cheese-Goggles, pop some corn, sit back and enjoy!