Svengoolie Intro: “Calling all stations! Clear the air lanes! Clear all air lanes for the big broadcast!”
I watched the movie “War of the Colossal Beast” last night. Sena saw only the first few scenes of it in the beginning because she took a bite out of a magical cake she got at Hy-Vee, grew into a giant (had to get a new roof), wandered downtown to the Ped Mall until she found a mushroom, nibbled on it till she shrunk down to normal size and didn’t get back home until the movie was over, so like always, I had to explain the show to her. Based on my Svengoolie movie “reviews” you can imagine how well that went!
Anyway, this movie was released by American International Productions in 1958 and it was a sort of but not really a sequel to their film “The Amazing Colossal Man,” released a year earlier. In that movie, a military man, Col. Glenn Manning got exposed to radiation in Las Vegas and grew to a height of 60 feet which meant he could hit the free throw shot from several miles away. He ran amok and the army lobbed bombs and shot bullets at him until he fell 700 feet off Boulder Dam and everybody assumed he died. Although there are restrictions on seeing this movie in certain venues because of a copyright restriction, you can find it on the web, including the Internet Archive.
In “War of the Colossal Beast,” the story picks up sort of where the not-really-a-prequel left off except, in the beginning of the movie, a lot of food trucks are disappearing from the roads. One of them belongs to John Swanson (George Becwar), a food truck owner whose truck got lost and says repeatedly to the police “Get the picture?” when he tells his account of what he knows about the theft. It doesn’t take long to “get the picture” that this is comic relief.
It turns out that Glenn Manning is filching food from trucks and he’s not sharing any of it with the 50-foot woman who has wandered over from a different movie set and is pretty hungry (partly because she drinks too much) after an extraterrestrial has zapped her with radiation leading to a sudden growth spurt.
A scientist, Dr. Carmichael (Russ Bender) and Maj. Mark Baird (Roger Pace) have “cooked up” a plan to catch Manning using Italian bread spiked with chloral hydrate and evidently, Manning’s sister Joyce (Sally Fraser) approves of this plan. Baird and Carmichael both taste the bread, and neither drops dead even though if there’s enough chloral hydrate in all that bread to knock out a 60-foot-tall man, there should be enough to kill a normal size man after just a small bite. Whatever.
After abandoning a plan to hire Manning to round up all the Bigfoot monsters in the country because he’s too brain injured to remember the details which is not to squash them beyond recognition and allow photographers to take photos of the operation, which may or may not have happened when the Van Meter Visitor (a huge pterodactyl) in Iowa hit town in the early 1900s and flew all over the place munching on the cattle until cowboys and farmers shot it down and then took pictures of it which people claimed they all saw in the local newspaper yet those issues are “not available” for some reason so I guess there’s some kind of Mandela Effect going on or some people are prone to telling “tall tales.”
In the meantime, Manning is being held down by ropes and chains and it’s obvious that he was brain injured in that 700-foot fall in the first encounter. His right eye is missing and some of his teeth are pushed to one side, possibly because of a roundhouse kick by Chuck Norris (himself) who caught him trying to steal his chloral-hydrate enriched Italian bread.
Somehow, Manning is able to pick the locks of his chains using the same hypodermic needle he harpooned somebody with in the first movie and which he hid in his giant adult diapers (yes, those would be Shorty’s Adult Diapers that Big Mo aka John Heim the KCCK radio wizard of the Big Mo Blues Show describes, “they’re ready when you aren’t!).
The action and the dialogue start to get more complicated towards the end, which I’m going to defer on revealing in order to avoid spoilers (OK, the butler did it).
This is an OK movie although the dialogue gets a little stilted toward the end. I give it a 3/5 Shrilling Chicken Rating.
Go Retire Psychiatrist 