The Giant Gila Monster

This one doesn't waste any time - at about the one-minute mark, the giant Gila attacks! (the victims are a young couple out on a date). The film slows down after that, unfortunately. Made in Texas, the tale takes place in some rural area, the main character a young mechanic and hot-rodder. There's a touching subplot involving his crippled younger sister; unfortunately, these scenes also involve the young mechanic singing dopey songs while playing a banjo ("And the  Lord said, Laugh, children, laugh..." etc). The sheriff argues a lot with the local bigwig, the father of the 1st victim.
There is an almost clever scene at the 50-minute mark. We focus on this old fart (Shug Fisher?  yee-haa!) driving his truck, taking swigs from a whiskey bottle. OK, we think, this guy is next on the menu; he races a train. The next minute, it's the train that gets it. The monster is played by a real Gila, obviously shot amid miniature settings; some of these don't work too well. No explanation is given for this giant creature's existence; the tagline is "Only Hell could breed such an enormous beast. Only God could destroy it."  (Well, maybe not God, just some nitro). The loudmouth bigwig states, at the one-hour point, that it's entirely conceivable that a giant lizard has lived in the area for years, due to the dense underbrush.
Writers in various reference books were not very kind to this one. Bill Warren, in Keep Watching the Skies, wrote "...this has the air of a monster movie filmed by people who only had heard rumors of monster movies before, but had never seen one." In the book, Giant Monster Movies, writer Robert Marrero is even less forgiving; he opines that the film is "the worst giant-monster-on-the-loose movie ever made" and "with bad performances, weak script and some special effects that will make your skin crawl."

The budget was $138,000, a bit more than the companion piece to this, The Killer Shrews. Ken Curtis was also a producer on this.
BoG's Score: 4 out of 10