Enormous Facts About ‘War of the Colossal Beast’
Svengoolie ends his summer of thrills and chills with a big finish — a colossal finish, you could even say — with the 1958 film War of the Colossal Beast, on Saturday, August 31, 2024, on MeTV.
In this atomic creature feature, food trucks are mysteriously vanishing on the roads of Mexico. Could a creature be taking them? A creature that used to be human? And will said creature eventually hold a bus full of middle schoolers hostage in the middle of Los Angeles’ Griffith Observatory?? Read on to learn all about the giant-sized, radioactive madness.
The Movie Is (Secretly) a Sequel
Though it doesn’t share a title with the previous film, War of the Colossal Beast is a sequel to the 1957 film The Amazing Colossal Man. In that previous film, Lt. Colonel Glenn Manning (Glenn Langan) survives a plutonium explosion and begins to grow exponentially, eventually reaching 60 feet — but his health and sanity deteriorate in the process. At that film’s climax, a deranged Manning trashes downtown Las Vegas and climbs the Hoover Dam (a series of events that does not sound all that different from the average Las Vegas bachelorette party). However, it all ends in tragedy for Manning, as he is fired upon by soldiers, and falls into the Colorado River.
In War of the Colossal Beast, gigantic Manning is revealed to have survived the fall off the dam, though he now has a massive disfiguring head wound (more on that later). He has also gone insane, and is living in seclusion in Mexico, surviving off what he finds in food delivery trucks that he lifts off mountain roads with his monumental paws. Tracked down by his sister Joyce, Manning is then trapped by the Army, breaks free to run amok in Los Angeles, picks up the aforementioned bus of schoolchildren and waves them around over the city’s iconic Observatory, and eventually recognizes the error of his colossal beastly ways and electrocutes himself with some power lines.
Though the film’s action immediately follows the goings-on of The Amazing Colossal Man — in fact, it contains flashbacks to that film — the film’s production company released it as a stand-alone, possibly to prevent people from feeling that they could not see this movie because they had not seen the first.
… But None of the Original Actors Returned
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Though having secondary characters not return for a sequel is common, War of the Colossal Beast also could not lure back The Amazing Colossal Man star Glenn Langan. So the role of Lt. Colonel Glenn Manning was portrayed by Dean Parkin, whose only other film role was as the similarly large and gruesome monster in 1957’s Lon Chaney Jr. vehicle The Cyclops. To obscure the fact that Manning was being played by a different actor, the character was given dramatic facial makeup — one side of his face is nearly melted off — and he only speaks one word throughout the film: “Joyce,” the name of his sister.
It Was Put Out by the Greatest American B-Movie Company of All-Time
Founded in 1954, American International Pictures pioneered the teen-oriented double feature film and gave the world B-movie legend Roger Corman (who was the studio’s star director and producer) — so they’re basically royalty for anyone who loves exploitation flicks, classic sci-fi, or countless other indie genres from the ’50s through the ’70s.
AIP carved out its place in American cinema through a patented system. Adult moviegoers at the time demanded big names and impressive sets, and an increasing number of them preferred to just stay home and watch high-production-value TV Westerns. But AIP found that teens enjoyed cheap, action-oriented films, in easy-to-produce genres like sci-fi. So AIP they decided to cater to a younger audience, and developed a procedure to create drive-in hits: they polled teens about what they wanted in a film, and developed titles, casts and plots from there.
Remind Using this philosophy, AIP produced War of the Colossal Beast, as well as some of the greatest (or, at the very least, best known) B-movies of the ’50s and ’60s. Some AIP classics include Michael Landon‘s I Was a Teenage Werewolf; the Vincent Price-Roger Corman-Edgar Allan Poe film The Masque of Red Death; Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello‘s 1963 Beach Party; and two films with Peter Fonda — 1966’s biker gang film The Wild Angels, and 1967’s hippie-sploitation film, The Trip (also featuring Dennis Hopper and Bruce Dern). Into the ’70s, AIP expanded more into adult fare, producing blaxploitation films like 1974’s Foxy Brown and distributing 1979’s The Amityville Horror. Though they were bought out by another company in 1980, they will always live on in the heart of anyone who loves rubber skulls, cheap special effects and the teenager within.
>> 8 Things You Didn’t Know About ‘I Was A Teenage Werewolf’
It Was Featured on a Famous Comedy Show
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If the name War of the Colossal Beast sounds familiar, it might be because you’re a 1950s B-movie fanatic. Or, it might be because you’re a devotee of the classic 1990s comedy series Mystery Science Theater 3000, in which a man and several robots who are trapped in space spend their free time making fun of old movies. In a 1991 episode, the gang took on this film; a standout moment includes a character shouting, “Find a Chevy truck, pick it up, all day long you’ll have good luck!” as giant Manning lifts up a food delivery truck.
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