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The Killer Shrews / The Giant Gila Monster; June, 1959
Topic Started: Jan 28 2018, 10:44 AM (206 Views)
Laughing Gravy
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The Giant Gila Monster (1959) Dir. Ray Kellogg
Hollywood Pictures
74 min. / B&W / 1.66:1

The Killer Shrews (1959) Dir. Ray Kellogg
Hollywood Pictures
69 min. / B&W / 1.66:1

ITB Strange Science Cinema #156-157

A pair of sadly much-maligned movies (and I'm probably going to malign them a bit, too) but I don't care a-cause they deliver the goods, albeit in a low-budget way, and have respect for their audience (their audience being, of course, horny teenagers at the drive-in) and they have some badass monsters in their own way, too. I'm not going to argue that these are good movies but certainly they're good BAD movies.

So, we pull dad's Edsel into the Starlight Drive-in, pop open the top of a couple of cans of Rolling Rock, and here comes our first feature, The Giant Gila Monster, a title which pretty much gives away the entire plot: in a small rural town, parked teens and traveling salesmen are disappearing like flies in a spider web, and because everybody in town, from the "hot rod racer" kids to the police force, have only one speed ("saunter"), nothing much gets done until a famous disc jockey comes to town to put on a record hop and the giant gila monster pokes his snout through the barn wall and tells the kids to knock it off, he's trying to sleep. Then it takes one brave young man, one hot rod, and four cans of nitroglycerine(!) to set the monster straight.

This is the movie, in case you've forgotten, where mechanic Don Sullivan (as "Chase") sings "The Lord Said Laugh" numerous times, mostly to a little crippled girl. Lisa Simone is his unintelligible foreign girlfriend, and if tonight's two films have any drawback (beyond the rather silly monsters and low budgets) it's the shockingly large amount of cast members who don't spick-a de English too good, yes? Shug Fisher is the local comic everybody calls "Old Man" (he was barely 50, ouch), Fred Graham is "Sheriff Jeff" and real-life DJ Ken Knox is Steamroller Smith, spinning an array of non-hit platters.

Million-dollar Scientific Explanation of How the Hell a Gila Monster Could Get as Big as a Burger King Franchise:
Sheriff Jeff: "There was another report out of Russia or the Ukraine; it was in the paper a couple of months ago, maybe you saw it, about a baby that weighed 130 pounds when it was 10 months old, and was taller than its mother."
Chase: *whistles* It would grow up to be a GIANT!"
Sheriff Jeff: "Yeah, and that same thing could happen right here."

Our monster is portrayed by an actual lizard (and a lizard-claw glove) on miniature sets, and in best King Kong and Godzilla fashion, it even wrecks a train. I couldn't see any optical effects whatsoever, so the lizard and the cast are never shown in the same shot, but then, I wouldn't want to be on set with a giant gila monster (or even a rear-projection of one) so that's okay. The cast is earnest, the soundtrack features actual rock 'n' roll for once, and the whole venture is imminently likeable - this film is a favorite of mine.

Well, our intermission consisted of several snack bar ads (including "let's all go to the lobby" but so far as I could tell, the drive-in HAD no lobby; I guess "let's all go to the concession stand" doesn't have the same musical ring to it), a Mr. Magoo cartoon called Barefaced Flatfoot, a parody of old-time murder mysteries that was a lot of fun, and the trailer for our next movie classic, Return of the Fly (WOW!).

And then it was on to our second big feature: The Killer Shrews! An able-bodied seaman and his mate deliver supplies to a scientific expedition on a remote island; a storm hits and the skipper and his pal are trapped, discovering to their horror that the island has been overrun by the offspring of a scientific experiment gone wrong: wolf-sized killer shrews with massive tusks and poisonous bites, beautifully portrayed by big hound dogs wearing shaggy rugs and rope tails (and by, of course, shrew puppets).

Our million-dollar cast here includes a couple of guys who'd go on to TV fame: James "The Sheriff on Dukes of Hazzard" Best as our heroic sea skipper and Ken "Festus" Curtis as Jerry, the boyfriend of our leading lady; Curtis - who also produced both of today's cinematic treasures - is quite willing to kill the rest of the party to get off the island alive. His girlfriend is Ingrid Goude, who speaks unintelligible English through a thick Swedish accent; her father is Baruch Lumet, who speaks unintelligible English through a thick Polish accent, and one wonders what Ingrid's mom was. Gordon McLendon is the scientist who types up his own death notice as he's succumbing to the poisonous bite of a shrew.

Million-dollar Dialog:

"What happened out there?"
"Oh, nothing. Jerry just tried to kill me twice in the last five minutes."

I've always speculated that the basic premise - a bunch of tense strangers thrown together who kill each other as monsters try to claw in through the doors and windows - inspired Night of the Living Dead but George Romero was too embarrassed to admit it. Financed by the owner of a chain of Texas drive-in theatres, this pair of films was still circling the globe as late as 1967 as a double-feature (I saw them as such with my big brudder in Akron, Ohio). If they were copyrighted, somebody let it expire and they're in the public domain and available on many low-cost science-fiction/horror DVD compilations, sometimes in widescreen and sometimes not. As with many of the films lampooned by Mystery Science Theater, they have been saddled with the designation of grade-z crap, which they are not: they're low budget but entertaining little slices of 1950s monster goodness, highly entertaining. One of my favorite movie twin bills.
"I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley
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The Batman
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Agreed, definitely better than their reputations would lead one to believe.

Always be yourself! Unless you can be Batman...then always be Batman!
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Laughing Gravy
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I've just been advised that Mr. Sullivan has passed away at the age of 80. RIP.
"I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley
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MovieMan
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Laughing Gravy
Jan 29 2018, 08:22 PM
I've just been advised that Mr. Sullivan has passed away at the age of 80. RIP.
Hey Laughing Gravy, when is this news gonna be appearing in the newspapers?
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MovieMan
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Laughing Gravy
Jan 29 2018, 08:22 PM
I've just been advised that Mr. Sullivan has passed away at the age of 80. RIP.
Whoever advised you on Don's death was incorrect with his age, he was 89, according to the IMDB.
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