Creature Features of The Week: The Giant Gila Monster & The Killer Shrews (1959)

When a couple of courting teenagers disappear from a small, isolated Texas town, their parents - and the local sheriff (Fred Graham) - fear they have eloped.

But this is just the start of a wave of disappearances, many connected to road traffic accidents on the lonely roads that traverse the unexplored woodland that surrounds the town.

The father of the missing boy, wicked mine owner Mr Wheeler (Bob Thompson), puts pressure on the sheriff to blame the disappearances on Chase Winstead (Don Sullivan), ace hot-rod mechanic and crooner, de facto "leader" of the local youth and clearly the smartest teenager in the county.

The sheriff isn't having any of it, because he relies on Chase to keep the other youngsters on the straight and narrow and he knows he's a good kid who cares for his widowed mother (Gay McLendon) and disabled younger sister, Missy (Janice Stone).

Eventually, the town drunk Old Man Harris (Shug Fisher) spots an enormous gila monster - the size of a bus - when it derails a passenger train, and the sheriff finally has something to work with.

The titular Giant Gila Monster

Meanwhile, Chase and his friends have organised a "platter party" (dance night) at a local hall, hosted by celebrity DJ, Horatio Alger 'Steamroller' Smith (Ken Knox), who owes Chase a favour.

Not only is Chase revealed to the audience as having just cut a record, but he also gets to sing a song - which he'd previously sung to his sister - but, thankfully, that's the moment the gila monster decides to attack the barn dance.

The sheriff drives the beast away with his rifle, but it's up to Chase to deliver the well-foreshadowed coup de grâce on the oversized reptile.

The Giant Gila Monster: Special Edition is the first Blu-Ray release from new film  restoration, preservation and distribution company, Film Masters.

The creature feature hits stores Stateside next Tuesday (September 26) as the headliner in a Blu-Ray double-bill with The Killer Shrews. 

Both films are from 1959, stalwarts of the drive-in era of no-budget shlock productions, cranked out for a very specific demographic.

Despite the often laughably poor acting and occasionally ropy script from director Ray Kellogg and co-writer Jay Simms, there is a convincing, 1950's sense of community pervading this 74-minute B-movie.

And it's this verisimilitude that comes closest to saving the picture because, in all honesty, until the closing moments, when townsfolk get to finally see their mysterious nemesis, The Giant Gila Monster is a whole heap of nothing.

Sure, things happen and Chase and the sheriff get to run around a bit but because they are so clueless as to what is really going on there's no real sense of jeopardy.

Random musical interludes from Chase, as well as nuggets of backstory coldly calculated to tug at your heartstrings, make the movie a quiet strange viewing experience, as more time is spent developing the potential victims than actually justifying what is happening with the giant monster.

The suggestion from the opening spiel is that it has grown large due to its lack of contact with any real threats in its isolated habitat, so why has the giant gila monster chosen now to start eating humans?

As far as I could tell no reason was given, although I like to think it was somehow tied to Wheeler's dodgy mining practices.

While the audience has sight of the monster from the get-go - a real life lizard dropped into miniature model sets - there is no actual interaction with it until the final act, and it's only then that we can truly get an idea of its supposed gigantic size and the threat it poses to the community.

Much of the action takes place at night, but thanks to this new restoration from 35mm archival materials (and Blu-Ray presentation), the contrast is crisp enough that while we still know it's meant to be night time we can actually see what's going on.

This new release of The Giant Gila Monster: Special Edition is definitely a film that connoisseurs of vintage "so bad it's good" monster movies need to add to their collection.

However, it's not really one for the casual viewer as you need to cut the film an awful lot of slack to really enjoy it.

As well as a trailer and commentary track, the Blu-Ray disc of The Giant Gila Monster includes an audio, archival, interview with the late Don Sullivan aka Chase Winstead.

"I'm in hot pursuit of them Killer Shrews"

Ironically the 'bonus feature' in the two-disc set, The Killer Shrews, is actually the superior film (which, of course, isn't saying much).

Captain Thorne Sherman (James Best) and his engineer, 'Rook' Griswold (Judge Henry Dupree), just manage to outrun a hurricane in their boat and make it to the isolated island where they have to drop off supplies.

There they discover a small scientific community, led by Swedish geneticist Dr Marlowe Craigis (Baruch Lumet) and his daughter, zoologist Ann Craigis (Ingrid Goude), preparing for a siege rather than just bad weather.

The handful of scientists and their assistants are living in fear of the results of an experiment run wild: giant shrews (actually dogs in ratty costumes) devouring all the wildlife. But now they've run out of other animals to eat and are turning on the small human population.

With the double threat of both a major weather event and mutant animals, The Killer Shrews is what old school Doctor Who fans would term a classic "base under siege" scenario.

There is genuine claustrophobic tension here as the sea captain tries to organise the defence of the island's adobe stockade against the mutant monsters.

Another masterpiece from the team of writer Jay Simms and director Ray Kellogg, Killer Shrews is a more focussed and coherent horror yarn than The Giant Gila Monster. 

While the shrews themselves are very obviously a combination of glove puppets (for close-ups) and 'disguised' canines (for long shots) there is an undeniable charm about this ultra-low budget approach to creating a swarm of killer monsters.

Even the justification for making the creatures even deadlier, by turning their bite's poisonous, is a clever little idea than works within the logic of the story. 

Coming in at barely over an hour's running time, there's a rugged, pulpy quality to The Killer Shrews, served up with some quality acting from the permanently drunk bad guy Jerry Farrell (Gunsmoke star Ken Curtis) and our square-jawed lead played by the future Sheriff Rosco P Coltrane of Dukes of Hazzard fame.

This disc includes a film commentary track, original radio spots for both movies, and an informative quarter-of-an-hour documentary on the career of Ray Kellogg.

He was a contemporary of Ray Harryhausen who took effects in a different (cheaper) direction as well as working on many big budget movies, including directing John Wayne's The Green Berets, and acting as second unit director on Cleopatra and Adam West's Batman: The Movie.

Also packaged with the films is a 24-page booklet featuring essays on the Texas radio pioneer and films' producer, Gordon McLendon (who appears in The Killer Shrews as absent-minded scientist Dr Radford Baines), and a critical dissection of Killer Shrews by professor and film scholar Jason A Ney.