The Giant Gila Monster may have been the perfect make-out movie. After all, as a low-budget, B-movie sci-fi/horror hybrid aimed directly at the insatiable teenage market, it played drive-ins in the late 1950s and early 1960s, yet it is so inept and boring that I can't imagine anyone actually wanting to watch it all the way through. So, even if stuck on a blind date about whom you're not particularly enthused, making out was certainly the better option over watching the movie.

Even hard-core fanatics of 1950s-era creature features will have a hard time getting excited about The Giant Gila Monster (which, by the way, is pronounced Hee-lah). Right up front is the problem with the creature itself: As movies of this sort live or die by the novelty of the rampaging creature and the subsequent delight it gives the audience watching it crush things, the titular monstrous lizard seen here is quite yawn-inducing. In fact, it is nothing more than a beaded gila lizard shot in extreme close-up wandering around poorly constructed models. While the classic-era stop-motion animation of FX wizards like Ray Harryhausen and Willis O'Brien were never particularly convincing, they were still a joy to watch because you got an immediate sense of the hours and hours of hard work and toil that went into them, the love and dedication of the labor (even the rubbery Godzilla movies at least feature the intricate details of the elaborate Tokyo sets). Watching a lizard drag its belly around a mound of dirt with a few branches stuck in it to resemble trees does not elicit the same response.

The Giant Gila Monster follows the prototype established by The Blob (1958), in which the producers combine the creature feature with the juvenile delinquent film, thus getting two drive-in genres for the price of one. That way, teenagers got to see themselves projected on-screen as larger-than-life heroes who get the monster in the end, rather than cops, military officers, or scientists, as in earlier atomic monster movies of the 1950s.

The hero here is a young, misunderstood rock-a-billy youth named Chase Winston (Don Sullivan). He works at the garage in a small, rural, West Texas town and dreams of being a singer-songwriter, but everyone in town seems to think he's a bad seed. The local sheriff (Fred Graham) has a soft spot for him, and understands that he is basically a good kid who has taken on a great deal of responsibility in his life (a single mother and a crippled little sister). This is not the perspective of Mr. Wheeler (Bob Thompson), the wealthiest and meanest man in town. Mr. Wheeler's teenage son has disappeared along with his girlfriend, and he believes that Chase may have had something to do with it.

In fact, a lot of people are disappearing, as well as cattle. Lots of wrecked cars with no bodies are found, yet no one seems to catch on that a large lizard living in the underbrush outside of town is responsible until it literally crashes a barn dance near the end of the movie. This brings up the movie's other major creature-related problem, which is that the Gila Monster is never posited as being particularly evil or malicious. Rather, most of the damage it does seems to be out sheer clumsiness due to its size (for instance, it causes a massive train wreck by destroying a bridge, but it's only because it couldn't quite fit underneath). Thus, the final attack on the barn dance seems out of step with its earlier behavior.

But, then again, this is the kind of movie where simple continuity between day and night proves to be a problem. Director Ray Kellogg, screenwriter Jay Simms, and producer Ken Curtis, the same team who made The Killer Shrews (1959), try to liven the movie up with some bad rock songs and a few heavy doses of sentimentality, but nothing can save this ill-fated disaster. The lesson learned here is, if you concoct a movie that requires something as elaborate as a giant lizard crushing cars and buildings, makes sure you have a budget that is, at the very least, large enough to pay for some blue-screen shots so the human victims can be seen in the same frame with the monster a few times.

King of the Bs Roger Corman, on the other hand, was a much more practical schlock filmmaker than Ray Kellogg was. He knew his tight budgetary and aesthetic limits, yet he still managed to churn out movies that weren't half-bad because they were firmly grounded in interesting ideas. The Wasp Woman is a good example, as it is a campy creature feature that also has some interesting themes regarding science run amok and the fruitless human search for eternal youth (as an added bonus, the acting is pretty good, too).

The lead actress is Susan Cabot, one of Corman's favorite actresses (she appeared in six of his films in three years, including 1957's Carnival Rock and 1958's Saga of the Viking), in her final film role. Cabot plays Janice Starlin, a beautiful and business-savvy woman who has founded her own cosmetics company. Unfortunately, the company is floundering because its products have always been sold using her face as the selling point, and Janice isn't getting any younger. Although still very attractive, she does not have the perfectly smooth, early-20s visage that once sold millions of cosmetics to eager women who wanted to look like she did.

Enter Dr. Zinthrop (Michael Mark), a slightly off-kilter scientist who approaches her about a youth serum he is working on that is made from the jelly of queen wasps. Janice is skeptical at first, until she watches Dr. Zinthrop inject an adult guinea pig with the serum, which then proceeds to revert back to being a baby (he does this with dogs and cats, as well).

Janice quickly volunteers to be his first human test subject, and when minimal doses of the serum over a period of weeks do not get the necessary results, she starts sneaking into the lab and shooting up with a lot more (the overtones of drug addiction, especially heroin and morphine, are hard to ignore). This gets the results she needs, as she starts looking like she's 23 again, but it has the unfortunately nasty side effect of turning her into a giant wasp at night who feeds on the blood of anyone she can find. Dr. Zinthrop doesn't turn out to be any help because he is hit by a car and suffers serious brain damage.

The make-up effects in the movie are certainly cheesy—Janice's silly wasp head and claw-like hands are directly inspired by the similarly ludicrous make-up effects in The Fly (1958). Corman knows this, and he wisely keeps his camera from lingering for too long on Janice when in wasp mode; instead, he cuts quickly, allowing us only quick glimpses before Janice moves in for the kill (which is depicted in fairly gruesome terms by 1950s standards).

Corman and screenwriter Leo Gordon (who scripted two more Corman-directed efforts, 1962's The Tower of London and 1963's The Terror) play with the conventions of the horror movie in some interesting ways. For instance, much of the action takes place in a modern high-rise office building, yet it is used in much the same was as an old Gothic castle would be, with foreboding hallways, locked doors, a mad scientist's laboratory, and victim's screams barely being heard by others through the walls. Corman and Gordon figured quite rightly that Janice could do some nasty work in the building without anyone noticing for some time; the building's sheer size makes it easy for her to kill victims and hide the bodies late at night.

The movie's underlying paranoia about aging is also a prescient one, especially in the cruel irony of a powerful businesswoman who, despite her professional skills and economic success, is still tied to her physical appearance. Yet, that physical appearance is deemed so important that is literally willing to kill for it. The Wasp Woman's ultimate message about the dangers of science tampering too much with nature is as old and well-worn as themes come in science fiction and horror (dating back at least to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein), yet Corman makes it work again, even with minimal resources at hand.