MegaMonsterMonth! #4 - War of the Colossal Beast (1958) - Now With 60-Foot Tall Spoilers!

Bert I. Gordon. The name is a legend among B-movie afficiandos. Active mostly in the late-Fifites and early-Sixites, Gordon produced and directed a string of low-budget horror and sci-fi movies.

Here are a few that any genre fan will recognize:

• The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) - The first part of the Glenn Manning Saga!
• Beginning of the End (1957) - Peter Graves versus giant grasshoppers!
• Valley of the Giants (1965) - Super-sized teenagers, a scourge of the 60s!
• The Food of the Gods (1976) - HG Wells comes back as a giant rat!
• Empire of the Ants (1977) - I want to pollinate Joan Collins! With sex!

Anyway, his films are generally low budget, have terrible special effects, laughable scripts, c-list actors...basically, everything you'd associate with drive-in fodder. They are also pretty entertaining, as long as you have the right mindset.

Synopsis

Picking up where The Amazing Colossal Man left off, Beast finds the 60-foot tall, diaper-clad Colonel Manning (Dean Parkin) horribly scared and driven insane from a bazooka blast he received at the end of the last film. He is living in the hinterlands of Northern Mexico, menacing the locals. He is eventually captured and brought to Los Angeles. While being held in an aircraft hangar, his sister Joyce (Sally Fraser) tries to reason with him, unsuccessfully. While chained to the floor, Manning has a lengthy flashback, retelling the story of The Amazing Colossal Man. All of the highlights of that film are shown. Manning eventually escapes. He makes it to the Griffith Observatory where he is surrounded by police and Army personnel. Joyce talks him out of destroying a convenient bus load of school kids. He has a brief moment of sanity, grabs hold of some high tension wires and evaporates. The End.

Analysis

By any reasonable standard, War of the Colossal Beast is a bad film. The acting is wooden. The effects are bad, even for the time, with Manning often transparent, a sign of poor mattes. While the make-up is effective in a few shots (and in stills) whenever he moves his mouth it looks like a latex appliance glued onto the skin. Which, of course, it is. The decision to go briefly to color stock for the finale when Manning electrocutes himself is pretty neat, even if it is only there for a ballyhoo effect; but it adds nothing to the movie. The music seems to be the same stock the Gordon uses in all of his films. And the direction is comprised mostly of static shots.

There are a few good scenes. The opening, where a Mexican teen (Robert Hernandez) is being chased by some unseen menace is well shot and tense. The initial appearance of the horribly scarred Manning delivers a jolt, as he emerges from behind a hill top, while our heroes stand among the wreckage of cargo trucks Manning has been raiding for food.

While a low-budget can be used to explain some deficiencies (like threadbare special effects work or the caliber of a cast) it cannot be used to justify a poorly written story. The film lacks drama. The characters who should get most of the screen-time, Joyce, is often pushed into the background. There are scenes that are in the film just to pad it out, like a 3 minute segment showing different agencies in DC passing the buck about who is responsible for the giant. It's a weird sequence that stops whatever forward momentum the film has and one that adds nothing to the story. The long, unneeded flashback (well, unneeded except to pad the movie run-time with recycled footage) is another scene that has nothing to do with the story and has no apparent impact on the character of Manning. It is there solely so Gordon could reuse footage. There are a number of scenes like this that exist to extend the film to feature length.

Not all of Gordon's work was like this. The Amazing Colossal Man is pretty good with Glenn Langan displaying some real pathos as the man slowly becoming an alien in his own body. Earth vs the Spider is a likeable enough romp, some decent effects and some fun moments of giant spider action. Even Beginning of the End (showcased in one of the best MST3K episodes) had decent acting by the Beginning was literally achieved by having grasshoppers crawl on photographs). While Gordon never made a really great movie, he did make films that tried to be entertaining. Unfortunately, War of the Colossal Beast is just lazy.

Notes

Even though it continues the story of The Amazing Colossal Man, Beast has a different cast and wasn't marketed as sequel.

Verdict

Beast straddles the line between so bad it's bad and so bad it's good. It is not one of Gordon's better films, mostly because of how, even at only 69 minutes long, it feels padded. It has some amusing moments and isn't a horrible way to spend an hour. However, if you want to check out a decent Gordon movie, check out The Amazing Colossal Man or Earth vs The Spider.

Check out the trailer.