EDITOR’S NOTE: The Amazing Colossal Man was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, December 5, 1964 at 11:15 p.m. and December 10, 1966 and the sequel, War of the Colossal Beast, was on Saturday, October 17, 1964 at 1 a.m. and also was on December 4, 1965 and September 2, 1967. The Cyclops was on the October 10, 1964 episode.

The Amazing Colossal Man: Lt. Colonel Glenn Manning (Glenn Langan) has been given orders to keep his men safe from a nuclear blast, but when a civilian glider crashes close to the area, he races out to save the day. He ends up getting blown up real good — one would argue exactly like Dr. Bruce Banner five years later — and has third-degree burns all over his body. Then, the bad news. The plutonium blast has caused his old cells to stop dying while the new ones multiply at an accelerated rate. That means that he’s growing ten feet a day and there’s no sign of it stopping.

Before long, his heart and brain can no longer support him and he’s running wild, decimating the olf Vegas strip and throwing giant syringes at scientists before taking a tumble off the Hoover Dam directly into next year’s War of the Colossal Beast.

Jim Nicholson of American International Pictures made this movie because The Incredible Shrinking Man was a success and he had the rights to Homer Eon Flint’s The Nth Man, which is about a man ten miles tall. Charles B. Griffith was hired for the script ad Roger Corman was brought on board to direct but soon dropped out. You know, if you’re going to make a movie with way too big or way too small people, get the man whose very name says BIG: Bert I. Gordon.

You can watch this on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZoAZ8Qshuk

War of the Colossal Beast: A spiritual sequel to The Amazing Colossal Man — with a different cast — this movie starts with Joyce Manning believing that her gigantic brother Lt. Colonel Glenn Manning survived his fall from Hoover Dam in the last movie.

He does live, except that his face is disfigured and he’s lost his mind as it tries to deal with the traumatic fall that he took. This facial damage was because there was a new star — and also a stagehand on the film — Dean Parkin and this would disguise the fact that they changed up who would play the lead. Stranger still, the dream sequence in the movie shows original actor Glenn Lanagan.

War of the Colossal Beast was produced, directed and written by Bert I. Gordon — the king of these kinds of movies — and co-produced by Samuel Z. Arkoff. The last scene of the movie was shot in color and then made into black and white to match the rest of the film.

You can watch this on Tubi.

The Cyclops: Bert I. Gordon made three movies in two years that had a giant bald man, played by Dean Parkin, menacing tiny people. Paul Frees is the voice of this horrible titular beast. It also has the same makeup artist as War of the Colossal Beast, Jack H. Young.

Bruce Barton is missing and his girlfriend Susan Winter (Gloria Talbott, who was also in this movie’s double feature, The Daughter of Dr. Jekyll) goes to find him. Lee Brand (Tom Drake) will fly the plane, scientist Russ Bradford (James Craig) will study the area and mining expert Martin “Marty” Melville (Lon Chaney Jr.) will get drunk and mean.

They also find all of the effects you expect from a Burt I. Gordon movie, like a giant iguana, a mouse, an eagle, a huge snake, a spider and yes, the Cyclops, who is really Bruce after being around all the radiation in the area.

Made in five days and before the money from RKO was taken away, this was a rough movie to work on, helped by the very real drinking of Chaney. But hey, Bert had a great poster that said “World’s Mightiest Horror! More Monstrous Than Anything Human Eyes Have Seen! The Giant Man-Thing growing 50 Ft. high in a horrendous land where nature has gone mad!”

In Tom Weaver’s Interviews with B Science Fiction and Horror Movie Makers, it turns out that Chaney wasn’t the only one getting loaded. During one scene in the plane, Talbott said, “Both Lon and Tom were absolutely smashed. James Craig was nipping a little, too, but nothing like what was going on in the front! And in this -h-o-t, tiny mock-up I was getting blasted from the fumes! It was such close quarters and so hot that I was ingesting alcohol through my skin. I was getting absolutely stoned, and by the time we got out of there I was weaving. If you watch that scene, you’ll see that every once in a while I look a little sick – well, I was!”