The Amazing Colossal Man

Here is this pretty famous 'giant monster' picture from the fifties, unusual in that rather than the expected giant animal, such as insects or even apes, it's a human male. This was director Gordon's cash in on The Incredible Shrinking Man of earlier in the year. As Bill Warren mentions in "Keep Watching the Skies", this may very well be Gordon's best - that's not saying all that much, but hey, every filmmaker has to have his own best movie, eh?
This one moves along pretty well and is usually interesting. The title character starts out as Colonel Manning, an overly heroic soldier who gets caught in the blast of a new Plutonium bomb. This burns off most of his skin. You'd think that would be the worst of it, but God or cosmic forces tend to play games with certain unlucky people in such films (when it involves new atomic weaponry, especially). Manning grows back the skin overnight and then starts to...well, you know. The tragedy here, imposed on the audience without much subtlety, is that Manning was a good man, even heroic; yet, this is his reward. His fiance doesn't have a good time of it either. He quickly develops a dark sense of humor and further problems - this film just piles 'em on this poor guy.

This lacks those moments of transcendence and poetic introspection in the superior Shrinking Man film, but Gordon gives it a good try and the FX are much better than the awful Attack of the 50-foot Woman a couple of years later, even if there is a slight see-through quality to the giant man in some scenes. One thing I've noticed in watching a film like this is that Gordon obviously is just copying elements & dialog of previous films, stuff he'd seen, I suppose, a year earlier - the scenes come across as very clunky and unintentionally humorous, as if the actors are just aping older scenes, in older movies. Which they are, I think. BoG's Score: 4.5 out of 10

As seen here, accomplishing such 'giant' FX is not too hard:
Colossal Trivia: Gordon wasn't finished with the giant ex-colonel and figured out more ways to torture him in War of the Colossal Beast, the sequel a year later. Gordon wasn't finished with giants even after that - there was Village of the Giants in '65 (a comedic take on it) and even in the seventies, Gordon was preoccupied with giant rats and ants.