The Amazing Colossal Man (1957)

The US military is testing a new “plutonium” bomb but it fails to detonate. Soldiers are ordered to stay put but when a civilian plane crashes inside the test site Colonel Manning leaves the safety of his trench to try and rescue the pilot. The bomb detonates and Manning is caught in the blast. He is not expected to live. Miraculously, his skin grows back overnight and doctors are stumped. Things escalate when he starts to grow and his behavior becomes erratic.

One doesn’t expect a “radioactive giant attacks Las Vegas” film to be rock solid with the science, especially when the title sounds like a sideshow attraction, but that low bar may have been too high of a hurdle. The most egregious error was that Colonel Manning’s erratic behavior was blamed on the fact that his heart was growing at a slower pace than the rest of his body because the heart was “only one cell”. Every part of the problem and proposed solution made no sense.

A bigger problem is the film’s reliance on exposition. The bomb test in the opening sequence was described by a man speaking over a loudspeaker, and each time the doctor needed to describe the current situation with Manning, they used the conference room with film strip trope.

On the positive side, the movie makes good use of its tiny budget. The sparse sets made sense in the context of the film. Also, the match cut (if I can call it that) when Manning is hit by the explosion was quite effective. And the heart of the film is about Manning’s feeling of disillusionment and dissociation. We see his attitude transform from anger at his predicament to disregard of the “little people”. Not exactly Oscar worthy, but better depth than you normally expect from the genre.

I kind of liked The Amazing Colossal Man. Producer/Director Bert I. Gordon only made 24 films between 1954 and 2015, and I saw a handful of them in my childhood. This, however, is only the second one during this fourteen year journey. I’ll likely see a few more. AMRU 3.