1950s SF film
The Giant Gila Monster, 1959, USA DIRECTED BY RAY KELLOGG
While there may may seem to be an almost infinite number of other formulaic 1950s monster b-movies that might be comparable to The Giant Gila Monster, there's only one that it ought to be properly compared with and that's The Killer Shrews, which Ray Kellogg filmed back-to-back with in 1959, and with which this was released as a drive-in double bill the same year. At least this film has a social context that The Killer Shrews completely lacked, and some of the performances Kellogg gets out of his actors here are actually quite decent and three-dimensional, despite this being a movie that never really coheres into something that's actually worth repeated viewing. The star is the genial Don Sullivan playing the young car mechanic Chase Winstead, a musical guy with a good heart who finds himself assisting the local law enforcement concerning a rising number of missing persons. What precludes this from being a science fiction movie proper is the absence of any science: so there's a giant lizard running around that no living (or at least sober) character actually sees until near the end; there's no mad scientist to blame, in fact only secondhand suggestions from an off-screen zoologist to explain exactly how the thing got so damn big. What we do get is teenage hot-rodders and the law playing catch-up while this Texas town is terrorised by a poorly filmed Mexican lizard.
The film's main problem is that any plot momentum that could have built up is not so much lost as thrown away time and time again, because all the plot threads are never really pulling in the same direction towards a dramatic resolution. It has a fair beginning, a rather tedious middle that you just wish would get going, and then a predictably explosive end - few creative elements, primitive special effects, no meta levels, just a movie that tries to be something more than the discovery of a gila lizard that's picked off a few people for no discernable reason. There was a remake made in 2012 titled Gila! in which an elderly Don Sullivan took a minor role, so I'd be interested in seeing that. But okay, I will compare this to one other movie: The Blob, for its portrayal of tearaway kids not conforming to negative stereotypes - however The Blob was always infinitely more watchable than this.