Rating:

Monster Mayhem

Author: Les Simons

In the beautiful world of giant, oversized monsters run amok through unprepared humanity, the 1959 movie The Giant Gila Monster was always one of my personal favorites. I discovered it on a cheap DVD set, late one night, cuddling in bed and watching a literal cheesefest of B-horror movies. I fell in love. It has everything you want from a movie so ludicrous that it’s good. I needed more. I needed a book length epic of giant Gila Monsters eating people (because really, who DOESN’T need that in their life.)

Enter Gila! by Les Simons (pen name of Kathryn Ptacek), the 1981 book (not related to my original movie – although who knows what inspired Ptacek). Gila! spawned its own movie in 2012. The story, at least the one in the book, follows one intrepid scientist (Kate) and her lover (Chato) as they try to stop a marauding herd of giant Gila Monsters who have emerged from the New Mexico dessert with an insatiable desire for human flesh. The Texan governor (actually named Buba) is insipid and stupid, the scientist (Kate) brilliant and brave, the lover (Chato) suitably down for the dirty at any time, and the bystanders absolutely delectable (at least by Gila standards).

Where the novel really works is when the monsters come out to play. Surprisingly, the Gilas are absolutely terrifying, and Ptacek spares no one. And I really do mean no one. Some young children get some pretty gruesome, drawn-out deaths, eviscerated by insatiably hungry Gilas. Others are just traumatized for life as a night at the carnival devolves into them watching their parents be torn, limb from limb. No, the monsters here aren’t as campy as you’d expect. They are a force to be reckoned with and the action cranks when they slither out of the desert, either eating their way through a carnival (the cover image), a country diner, or even a quite suburban home. While the Gilas aren’t scientifically accurate (they chew sideways, drip venom, have glowing eyes, impenetrable hides, and only come out at night), they are fun. Five stars for the creatures and for the scenes where they terrorize everyone.

Image by Amore Seymour from Pixabay

But then . . . then there is the rest of the story, which alternates between being overly silly (the stupid, drawling governor) and just lifelessly dull. It doesn’t fall to the usual tropes though. The scientists accept what they find – no “but it can’t be” denial moments. The governor and his cohorts, after seeing the scope of the destruction, do the right thing and call in the National Guard, and people take the warnings seriously. Yet, the characterization just isn’t there, and the moments with the humans have us skipping pages and looking for some more escalating Gila content.  The endless sex scenes (which are neither steamy nor particularly descriptive) between Kate and Chato, who are more concerned about getting it on than stopping people from being eaten, really just get in the way of the death and destruction we’ve all come to see.

Kate and Chato are also non-entities (both inside and outside the bedroom), and the scenes with them having their conversations are endless and tepid. We long for the chapters to be over or for the Gilas to chow down on some more kids. Kate is the stereotypical take-no-nonsense woman, Chato is a human sex toy who could be totally removed from the narrative without harming anything, and the other characters are either future bait or they exist to make bumbling mistakes (like the racist journalist and the National Guard who get stuck in a pile up of their own tanks).

That’s why, really, the entire book is just ok, instead of being the fun, campy fest it should have been. I think the fun will be more in a two-hour movie than in slogging through a relatively short book that feels surprisingly long.

 

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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