The Killer Shrews (1959, Ray Kellogg)

I’m not sure The Killer Shrews is the best movie with a protagonist with the first name Thorne, but it’s got to be very high on the list. James Best plays that lead—Captain Thorne Sherman of the S.S. Minnow, and he and first mate Judge Henry Dupree are on a three-hour tour… okay, no, but only because the script doesn’t put any thought into the setup.

Sherman’s delivering supplies to a remote island. It’s his first time doing the run; the other guy is sick. There’s a hurricane due in, so Sherman and Dupree are racing it to the island. They’re planning on holing up onshore until it’s done, then heading back. When they arrive on the island, they discover a peculiar setup.

Swedish mad scientist Baruch Lumet is trying to shrink human beings so we use fewer resources. Except they’ve been testing on shrews—oh, there’s an opening monologue about how shrews need to eat three times their body weight in a day, or they’re going to eat people (basically)—and one of their treatments turned the shrews into twenty-pound beasts. The shrews run the island, except they’re nocturnal (basically evil moles), so the movie’s first act is Lumet’s daughter, Ingrid Goude, trying to convince Best to stay in the house.

Most of the film takes place in the living room of the house. It’s an unconventional lab, but they’re an unconventional team. There’s Gordon McLendon as the brain, Lumet as the visionary, and Ken Curtis as the drunken screw-up whom Lumet’s paired off with daughter Goude. The general assistant, Alfredo de Soto, gets stuck making drinks and doing security rounds.

Everyone on the island is a big lush because they spend all their time waiting for the shrews to eat each other, except before then, the shrews will try to break into the house and eat the people. The people also don’t have radio, so they’re unprepared for the hurricane.

The movie is Best unraveling the initial mystery, falling for Goude, and fighting back 800 giant Killer Shrews. It’s a mix of labored exposition, dogs dressed up as shrews (badly; very badly), adorable, cheap rodent puppets (a quick FYI: shrews aren’t rodents; I was serious before: they’re really mole cousins), and violent love triangle stuff. See, Curtis isn’t ready to give Goude up to some flyboy skipper like Best.

Best, bless him, is a thirty-year-old man dressed up in a captain’s outfit like a five-year-old getting his picture taken. He deserves an award for keeping that hat on. While the special effects have considerable ambition, which they fail to deliver on spectacularly, Best’s hair is always great. Must have used so much product.

Best does not make the material good. But he manages not to embarrass himself too much in the film, which seems impossible thanks to director Kellogg’s failings as well as the supporting cast.

Lumet’s quite bad as the mad scientist. Goude may be worse as the daughter. Curtis isn’t good—though he does have a couple good scenes—and he sometimes does particularly poorly, but he’s nothing compared to Lumet and Goude. They’re atrocious.

Curtis also produced, which is funny since his character’s a complete shitheel.

Dupree and de Soto do all right considering they’re the two people of color in the film, and Shrews is definitely a horror movie if you’re wondering how to figure out who will get it first.

There’s some good photography from Wilfrid M. Cline and some bland photography from him. The house isn’t a great set, and Cline can’t make it not look like a cheap set. Certainly not with Kellogg’s tedious direction. Shrews is either talking, action, or waiting for action. Kellogg directs the talking and waiting exactly the same, leaving all the suspense for the action. Except Jay Simms’s script is all about the tension breaking people down. It’s practically a Southern Gothic, and Kellogg totally misses it.

Simms’s script deserves better, even with its not inconsiderable problems.

But, all things considered, Shrews isn’t bad for a no-budget fifties atomic-age sci-fi monster movie.

The Giant Gila Monster (1959, Ray Kellogg)

I thought this one was called The Great Gila Monster, not The Giant Gila Monster. During the first act, I kept thinking how Great was one heck of a flex given the content, but it’s not Great; it’s Giant, which is technically correct. The film is about a giant Gila monster terrorizing a bunch of hot-rodding Christian high school post-grads as they try not to go too fast, either with their cars or their girlfriends.

The film never identifies the location beyond “The Southwest,” with an opening narration about the vast empty plains (they’d be perfect for high-speed rail, don’t you think), in what turns out to be an homage to one of the Citizen Kane newsreels.

In this no-budget regional indie giant monster movie. It’s a cool enough way to start, and while the film never reaches those heights again (knowing Citizen Kane exists), it’s reasonably good, all things considered. The leads are Don Sullivan and Fred Graham. Sullivan’s the leader of the hot-rodders; the film opens with their richest kid member getting eaten by the Gila monster, which leads to the kid’s obnoxious father, poorly played by Bob Thompson, getting sheriff Graham to start an investigation. Thompson’s kid was with his girlfriend, but besides acknowledging she has a family, the film completely forgets about them.

What’s interesting about Gila is how long it takes everyone to find out about the monster. They don’t have the budget for much in the way of special effects—the Gila is an uncredited Mexican beaded lizard who only gets to crawl around the model train set when there’s an effects sequence. There aren’t even miniature cars until the finale. For a movie without Matchbox money, Gila does all right.

There are some obvious problems. Texas explains the casual, low-key racist slang and Christianity (Sullivan’s also a singer-songwriter who’s got a doozy about Adam and Eve, apparently because he doesn’t know the end of the story). Kellogg’s a lousy director for most of the material; everything’s a medium two-shot, which is fine with Sullivan and Graham; they’ve got personality and charisma. Everyone else is an energy vampire, starting with Thompson. Oh, wait, I’m forgetting about town drunk Shug Fisher. He hates his wife and drives drunk everywhere and gets away with it. He’s not good, but he’s not an energy vampire.

But Sullivan’s got a little sister—Janice Stone—who just got her leg braces, so she’s learning to walk again; their dad recently died (which is apparently when Graham took an interest). Thompson hates Sullivan, whose father died working for Thompson, and Sullivan’s dating Thompson’s French maid, Lisa Simone.

It’s all very convoluted, and only in Gila to get the run time past sixty minutes. Without the character drama and musical numbers, Gila would struggle to crack an hour.

Surprisingly good photography from Wilfrid M. Cline—his black and white day-for-night is noteworthy—and maybe an actually great score from Jack Marshall. Maybe some of it on a Theremin. It’s weird but also way more imaginative than the film needs.

Sullivan’s not exactly good, but he’s got a decent screen presence. Though once you realize he looks like a young Robert Taylor doing a James Stewart impression, you can’t unsee it. Graham’s just full-stop good. It’s a bewildering, welcome performance.

Giant Gila monster isn’t great (or really giant), but it’s engaging and successful as a “Giant” monster picture, at least a close to no-budget one.