Exploded Face Giant
The 60-foot tall Lt. Col. Glenn Manning didn’t die after going berserk in Vegas in The Amazing Colossal Man (1957). (People going mad in Vegas? Yeah, that’s likely.) Even though we saw him get shot with military bullets and fall off the Hoover Dam™ and plunge one million feet to his watery grave, turns out he floated downstream all the way into Mexico – and no one saw him!
The authorities want to capture him because he’s in the country illegally. Mexican people wouldn’t cross our borders without proper papers, so we gotta help them.
Manning, whose face is half blown off, missing an eye and sporting more scar tissue than a breast augmentation clinic, is starving. So he grabs trucks off the road and opens them up to see if there’s some yummy goodness inside. There is.
This gives the military a bright idea, so they drug some food bait and the next thing you know, Manning is tied up in an airplane hangar. No one knows what to do with him as his mind is Jell-O™ and he keeps making growling sounds like a constipated harbor seal.
Thankfully, he breaks free and goes for a walk, smashing a few things along the way. They finally corner him at the Griffith Observatory – right where a school field trip is in session. Even though it’s nighttime and even though a bald 60-foot giant with an exploded face and circus tent undies is in the area, the police seem to think it’s OK to let the kids learn about Uranus.
When Manning appears and the kids are quickly hurried onto the bus, they suddenly look to him like a giant Hostess Twinkie™ with lots of scream filling inside. Manning picks up the bus and threatens to eat/throw it (I was really hoping he would, even crossing my fingers and wishing out loud), but his sister shows up and pleads for him to put the bus down. What a partyblocker.
As a monster, War of the Colossal Beast (1958) is truly one of ’50s sci-fi more awesomely awesome icons; his exploded face will scare the circus tent pants right off you. And that sea lion growl with extra reverb he makes…friggin’ eerie, man.
January 27, 2013 at 8:25 pm
War of the Colossal Beast felt like an interesting slog to me, if that combination of words quite makes sense. I guess it was an inevitable follow-up movie, but it took what felt most appealing about The Amazing Colossal Man, that it was hard not to feel for Colossal Man, and didn’t just ignore it but kicked it completely out of the film.
January 27, 2013 at 11:52 pm
Agreed – except I thought the blasted face was fairly graphic for the ’50s. And Colossal Man should go out with the 50-foot Woman