When I was a kid, WXIA Channel 11 showed a wild menagerie of sci-fi/horror features every Saturday afternoon. This was back in 1979 and 1980. I remember going to the city pool, listening to ELO songs on the top-40 radio station, and heading back home in time for the creature feature on 11-Alive! The film catalog on this program was stuck mainly in the late-50s through early-70s. So I would tune into Unearthly Wife one Saturday and then The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant the following weekend. What I didn't notice at the time was the American International Pictures logo at the start of the black and white movies. It was AIP that provided such WXIA doozies like The Beast with a Million Eyes and The Amazing Colossal Man. I was particularly fond of the latter, a tale of a man who survives a plutonium blast only to grow 10 feet a day. I also got a kick out of the giant grasshopper thriller Beginning of the End, with Peter Graves stopping the onslaught of marauding mutant insects in Chicago. I remembered seeing stills from The Amazing Colossal Man and Beginning of the End in my brother's Starlog a couple of years earlier. That was an article all about Mr. B.I.G. - Bert I. Gordon, who helmed these pictures and many other giant monster movies. Recently I borrowed the Samuel Z. Arkoff Cult Classics double feature DVD from a work friend and exposed my kids to the enjoyment of B movie monster mania from the AIP vault -- War of the Colossal Beast and Earth vs. the Spider (both from 1958)
Both War and Earth were featured prominently in Famous Monsters of Filmland when I was a kid (late 70s). There was a Castle Films ad for both movies in the Captain Company section. The Colossal Beast ad had a closeup of the disfigured mug of the Beast (probably when he was picking up the bread truck). Spider had a chilling spider with a skull head climbing down its web. Oh, for want of those Super 8 gems in the back of FM! I had to wait until the early 90s to see the Colossal Beast's rampage in Los Anglele, and that was on Mystery Science Theater 3000. I didn't see Spider until a few years ago, even though this was on tape at Blockbuster and Wal Mart back in the early-90s (even on Cinemax during that period). So I had a blast taking in the 50s drive-in (or Saturday matinee) monster rampage with my kids, who gave the films a formidable 4.2 out of 5!
War of the Colossal Beast is probably the better of the two. This one is a sequel to the MIA on DVD 1957 cult classic The Amazing Colossal Man. In Amazing, Glenn Langan played Colonel Glenn Manning - the unfortunate 60' man pulverizing Las Vegas (thanks to Bert I. and Flora Gordon's special effects). The big guy got blasted by a bazooka and fell to his "death" in the Boulder Dam. A year later, food trucks are going missing in Mexico and one of the drivers screams out something about a giant while lying in his hospital bed. Glenn's sister travels down from L.A. to help look for her brother, who is missing an eye and half of his face due to scar tissue from the fall (or not being able to get Langan to reprise the role). Glenn is now an amnesic, snarling, roaring menace, who gets tranquilized and flown to LAX for observation. Whoa - bad move! Fortunately, it's not a bad movie, despite a few lulls and slow start. The Beast makeup is iconic and was applied by Harry Thomas onto bald Dean Parkin.
Earth vs. the Spider (or The Spider, as it was originally released) is AIP's take on Universal's Tarantula. The humungous bird spider roosts inside a condemned cave, only to come out at night looking for meals on wheels. Teenagers get involved in the hunt for the hairy arachnid when a girl's father goes missing on the dark, desolate highway. Once it is "killed" and put on display in the high school near the 30 minute mark, you know this town is going to be in trouble. It's rock and roll that sets this beast off for the rampage. This picture has the nice ambience of a small 50s town, complete with bakeries, mattress plant, homey sheriff's office (with out of shape sheriff and deputy), and a movie theater showing Attack of the Puppet People! There are even multiple posters of The Amazing Colossal Man! Both pictures are from Mr. B.I.G.'s amazing colossal film catalog.
Now if we could only get The Amazing Colossal Man on DVD!
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