Mystery Science Theater 3000: THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN
June 18, 2015 12:31 AM - Season 3, Episode 9 - Subscribe

(1957, Black & White, B Movie, Sci-Fi, Military, Atomic Weapons) "Amazing! Colossal! Growing! Growing! Growing! To a Giant! To a Monster! To a Behemoth! When Will It Stop?" An army colonel gets exposed to a new kind of bomb and comes to grow huge in size. I suppose that makes it not a very good weapon. The only non-foreign, non-made-for-TV movie that the MST3K guys would get both the original and the sequel for: its successor comes ten episodes later, in 319 WAR OF THE COLOSSAL BEAST. Another film directed by Mr BIG himself, Bert I. Gordon. YouTube (1h38m) First aired August 8, 1991.

Annotated MST3K - Daddy-O - MST3K Wikia

IMDB (4.2 stars)
"Lt. Col. Glenn Manning is inadvertently exposed to a plutonium bomb blast at Camp Desert Rock. Though burned over 90% of his body, he survives, and begins to grow in size. As he grows, his heart and circulatory system fail to keep pace with his growth, and he is gradually losing his mind as a result of reduced blood supply to his brain. He reaches 50 feet tall before his growth is stopped. By this time he has become insane. He escapes and wreaks havoc upon Las Vegas before he is finally stopped."
Directed by Bert I. Gordon. Written by him, Mark Hanna and George Worthing Yates. Starring Glenn, Langan, Cathy Downs and William Hudson.
posted by JHarris (4 comments total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
Showing tonight at 9 PM Eastern, at < href="http://sync-video.com/tv/rodneylives">http://sync-video.com/tv/rodneylives. The "deets," which is what all the hip young squid say, are here.
posted by JHarris at 8:11 AM on June 18, 2015


GAH, stupid HTML. Here it is linkified.
posted by JHarris at 8:26 AM on June 18, 2015


What could a man do in his life to deserve......
posted by wittgenstein at 11:50 AM on June 18, 2015


I just dropped by to say that:

1. This is one of the 25 or so films shown on MST3k that I'd watched unironically either at the cinema, drive-in, or on late night teevy "Shock Theatre" decades before MST3k. They weren't all super-obscure microbudget vanity projects like Manos or Creeping Terror.

2. The pah-suede-oh sequel, War of The Colossal Beast was another. Years later, when I saw this one MSTified, I got confused: Wait -- where's the cave? The helicopter? The giant arrow? Where's Lon Chaney? Then I realized --

3. There was a third Burt I. Gordon radioactive giant movie, The Cyclops. This one also deals with a disfigured 60 foot tall radioactive mutant roaming the desert who is in reality the heroine's fiance. And in fact, the eponymous monster was played by the same actor who portrayed the Colossal Beast.

Memory fades, but according to WP, of the three, The Cyclops was actually made first! Wonder why MST never 'did' The Cyclops. Maybe 'cuz it's really short and they'd already run out of jokes about his size, face, loincloth, etc. but the presence of Lon Chaney, Jr. should have given them plenty to talk about.

Finally, The Cyclops should not be confused with the film Doctor Cyclops (1940), which deals with shrunken rather than colossal people. This film contains no actual cyclops, except in the most obique way, but is all-in-all a better movie than any of the others mentioned here.
posted by Herodios at 10:38 AM on June 19, 2015 [1 favorite]


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