The man who produced The Giant Gila Monster also invented Top 40 radio. Gordon McLendon — Yale-educated, Naval intelligence officer, creator of KLIF Dallas, founder of the Liberty Broadcasting System, owner of the largest drive-in theater chain in Texas — needed co-features for his main attractions and decided to make them himself. He and his father B.R. McLendon financed the film back-to-back with The Killer Shrews, using the same director, the same crew, the same producer, and the same Texas locations. Both pictures were cited as the first feature films ever produced in Dallas. Gordon McLendon narrates The Giant Gila Monster himself. His estate was estimated at over $200 million by 1981.
The producer, Ken Curtis, was John Ford’s son-in-law, the man who replaced Frank Sinatra as Tommy Dorsey’s band vocalist, a former member of the Sons of the Pioneers alongside Roy Rogers, and the actor who had appeared in The Searchers (1956) alongside John Wayne. He would later play Festus Haggen on Gunsmoke for eleven years. In 1959 he was producing a monster movie in Texas. These things coexist in his filmography without apparent difficulty.
The gila monster in the film is a real gila monster. It was filmed crawling across a scale-model miniature landscape by Ray Kellogg, a visual effects specialist who had photographed the Nuremberg Trials and who later co-directed The Green Berets (1968) with John Wayne. Kellogg agreed to do the special effects in exchange for being allowed to direct. The result runs 75 minutes, ends with a nitroglycerin hot rod driven into the creature at full speed, and has been playing on one screen or another — drive-in, cable, internet — for sixty-five years.
The Giant Gila Monster 1959 — Movie Overview Table
| Detail | Information |
|---|---|
| Title | The Giant Gila Monster |
| Release Date | July 15, 1959 (wide); premiered June 25, 1959 (Texas) |
| Country | United States |
| Runtime | 74–75 minutes |
| Genre | Science Fiction Horror, Giant Monster Film, Hot Rod Film |
| Language | English |
| Format | Black & White, Sound |
| Director / Story | Ray Kellogg |
| Screenplay | Jay Simms |
| Producers | Ken Curtis; B.R. McLendon; Gordon McLendon (Executive Producer / Narrator) |
| Cinematography | Wilfred M. Cline |
| Editor | Aaron Stell |
| Music | Jack Marshall; songs by Don Sullivan |
| Special Photographic Effects | Ralph Hammeras & Wee Risser (real gila monster on scale model landscape) |
| Makeup | Corinne Daniels |
| Production Company | Hollywood Pictures Corporation |
| Distributor | McLendon-Radio Pictures Distributing Company |
| Budget | $138,000–$175,000 (cited variously) |
| Filming Location | Near Dallas, Texas |
| Paired With | Released as double feature with The Killer Shrews (same director, same crew) |
| Notable | First feature films produced in Dallas; MST3K Season 4; Gordon McLendon invented Top 40 radio; Ken Curtis = Festus from Gunsmoke |
| IMDb Rating | 3.9/10 |
| Public Domain | Yes — freely available to stream and download |
Full Cast — The Giant Gila Monster (1959)
| Actor | Role |
|---|---|
| Don Sullivan | Chase Winstead (mechanic, hot rod racer, singer) |
| Fred Graham | Sheriff Jeff |
| Lisa Simone | Lisa (Chase’s girlfriend) |
| Shug Fisher | Old Man Harris (comic relief) |
| Bob Thompson | Mr. Wheeler |
| Janice Stone | Missy Winstead |
| Ken Knox | Horatio Alger “Steamroller” Smith (KLIF disc jockey, playing himself-adjacent) |
| Gay McLendon | Mom Winstead |
| Don Flournoy | Gordy |
| Cecil Hunt | Mr. Compton |
| Stormy Meadows | Agatha Humphries |
| Howard Ware | Ed Humphries |
| Pat Reeves | Rick |
| Jan McLendon | Jennie |
| Jerry Cortwright | Bob |
| Gordon McLendon | Narrator (Executive Producer) |
Gordon McLendon — The Father of Top 40 Radio Made a Monster Movie
Gordon McLendon was born in Paris, Texas in 1921, studied Far Eastern languages at Yale, served as a Japanese-language intelligence officer for Naval Intelligence during World War II, and came home to buy a radio station in Palestine, Texas before his father B.R. helped him establish KLIF in Dallas in 1947. What he built there reshaped American radio entirely: the Top 40 format, station jingles, mobile news units, editorialized news, and interactive contests — all either invented or systematised at KLIF under McLendon’s direction. Britannica credits him, alongside Todd Storz and Bill Stewart, with the creation of Top 40 radio. Radio Hall of Fame inducted him in 1994.
He also owned the largest chain of drive-in theaters in Texas. This is relevant to The Giant Gila Monster in a direct sense: McLendon needed content for his screens, decided it was more efficient to produce it himself, and financed two monster pictures back-to-back — this film and The Killer Shrews — as co-features for his drive-in programme. The same disc jockey from KLIF, Ken Knox, appears in the film as the character Horatio Alger “Steamroller” Smith, a name chosen with the specific awareness that the teenager watching at a Texas drive-in in 1959 would recognise the voice from the radio.
McLendon narrates the picture himself, in the same broadcast-polished voice he used for his famous baseball game recreations. His fortune, by 1981, was estimated by Forbes at over $200 million. He ran for governor of Texas in 1968, withdrew, and eventually sold the entire broadcasting portfolio for approximately $100 million. The man narrating the gila monster attack on a model train set was one of the wealthiest media figures in postwar America. This fact does not make the train attack better, but it does make it more interesting.
Ken Curtis — Sinatra’s Replacement, Ford’s Son-in-Law, Festus, Producer
Ken Curtis was born Curtis Wain Gates in Colorado, the son of a town sheriff whose family lived above the jail. His mother cooked for the prisoners. He grew up to play clarinet in the marching band, sing with Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra after Sinatra’s departure, join the Sons of the Pioneers alongside Roy Rogers, appear in John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), and marry Ford’s daughter Barbara. He is the most operatically credentialed producer of a 1959 drive-in monster picture in the historical record.
Curtis produced both The Giant Gila Monster and The Killer Shrews simultaneously, handling the logistics of the back-to-back Texas shoot. His role in casting was specific: he allowed Don Sullivan to pick the songs himself, with the teenage drive-in market in mind. The result is a film in which the male lead stops the plot twice to perform original rock songs, which is not typical of the giant monster genre but was exactly what the audience paying drive-in admission in 1959 wanted to hear.
By 1964 Curtis was Festus Haggen on Gunsmoke — a role he would hold for eleven years, replacing Burt Reynolds’s brief tenure as the show’s comic deputy. The high-pitched, nasal drawl he used for Festus was entirely constructed; his actual speaking and singing voice was a smooth baritone. He died in Fresno in 1991. His production filmography consists of exactly two entries. Both are public domain monster pictures shot in Texas in 1959. Both are better than their reputations, depending on who you ask and what mood they’re in.
Full Plot Summary — The Giant Gila Monster (1959)
A young couple parked in a rural Texas ravine are attacked by a giant gila monster and their car goes over the edge. When the couple doesn’t show up, their friends begin asking questions. The local sheriff (Fred Graham) is simultaneously trying to manage the mystery disappearances and the general restlessness of the local teenage population, for whom he has designated go-to-contact: Chase Winstead (Don Sullivan), a young mechanic and hot rod racer who runs a garage, looks after his disabled sister Missy, and somehow also maintains a functional social life and a French girlfriend named Lisa (Lisa Simone).
Chase Finds the Car — and Something Else in the Ravine
Chase locates the crashed car in the ravine while helping the sheriff investigate. There’s evidence of something large. The investigation proceeds cautiously, and the film uses the standard 1950s giant-monster structure: creeping revelation, denial from authority, then unavoidable confrontation. The creature attacks a train — depicted using a model train set, with the real gila monster filmed crawling over a miniature landscape — and at this point the sheriff has to accept that he is dealing with approximately a seventy-foot poisonous lizard.
The Sock Hop, the Monster, and the Nitroglycerin Hot Rod
The gila monster, emboldened by the train attack and apparently indifferent to community planning, heads straight for the local dance hall where all the teenagers have gathered for a sock hop. Before it arrives, Chase has already loaded his prized custom-built hot rod with nitroglycerin, rigged it to maintain speed, and aimed it directly at the creature. He drives it in. The explosion terminates the lizard. Chase loses the car. The town is saved. The film ends.
The ending is the film’s most committed moment — a teenager sacrificing his most valued possession, the car he built, to save the people he cares about. It’s a cleaner moral resolution than most A-pictures of the period manage, delivered in a 75-minute monster film where the monster is a real lizard on a miniature set. That the gesture works at all is a function of Don Sullivan’s earnestness throughout the picture and the care with which the script establishes what the hot rod means to Chase before it blows up.
Ray Kellogg — The Nuremberg Cameraman Who Got a Directorial Debut
Ray Kellogg’s career before The Giant Gila Monster was as a visual effects specialist and cameraman. He had shot footage at the Nuremberg Trials as a US Army cameraman. After the war he worked on photographic effects for major Hollywood productions and eventually came to the attention of Gordon McLendon’s Texas operation. The deal was simple: Kellogg would handle the special effects in exchange for being allowed to direct. McLendon’s budget didn’t stretch to hiring two separate people for both roles.
The special effects method Kellogg used for the creature sequences is low-budget but visually distinct: a real, live gila monster, filmed crawling across a carefully constructed scale-model landscape. The Letterboxd community noted the creature “didn’t look right” to anyone familiar with actual reptiles — the animal used was clearly not a gila monster in any taxonomically strict sense.
The Moria Reviews assessment was plain: the film was directed by “a former US Army cameraman who had shot footage of the Nuremberg Trials” and whose subsequent directorial work included the boy-and-dog film My Dog, Buddy (1960) and, at the opposite end of the prestige scale, The Green Berets (1968) with John Wayne. The range of Ray Kellogg’s directorial career — from a $138,000 Texas monster picture to John Wayne’s Vietnam War film — is genuinely unusual.
Don Sullivan — The Lead Who Wrote the Songs
Don Sullivan plays Chase Winstead with the specific quality that 1959 drive-in cinema required from its teenage leads: earnest, physically capable, morally uncomplicated, and able to carry a melody. Ken Curtis gave Sullivan the latitude to select and perform his own songs for the film, with the teenage audience explicitly in mind. The result is a picture that stops twice for musical performances — which would be disruptive in a conventional horror film and is instead a feature in a film designed for drive-in teenagers who wanted entertainment in multiple registers simultaneously.
Sullivan had appeared in other low-budget genre pictures and was a known quantity in the drive-in market. The casting of Lisa Simone as his French girlfriend Lisa brought something the source data flags explicitly: she had been the French representative for Miss Universe 1957. The combination of a Texas hot rod mechanic and a French beauty contest finalist is the film’s most improbable character detail, and the script doesn’t particularly explain it, because the drive-in audience in 1959 did not require explanation for that particular combination.
Where to Watch The Giant Gila Monster (1959) Free Online
The Giant Gila Monster is in the public domain and legally available across multiple platforms at no cost.
| Platform | Format | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Internet Archive | Stream + Download (multiple formats) | Free |
| YouTube | Stream (multiple uploads; quality varies) | Free |
| Tubi | Stream (with ads) | Free |
| Pluto TV | Stream (with ads) | Free |
| Legend Films DVD | Colorized double-feature with The Killer Shrews | Paid |
| Rhino Entertainment MST3K | MST3K version — Collection, Volume 10.2 box set; also individual disc | Paid |
The Giant Gila Monster (1959) on Internet Archive:
Is The Giant Gila Monster (1959) in the Public Domain?
Yes. The Giant Gila Monster is in the public domain in the United States, and it’s also on the List of Films in the Public Domain, kind of straightforward. You can stream it, download it, and share it freely, no restrictions or any payment needed.
The Legend Films colorized DVD release and the Rhino Entertainment MST3K box set are made as separate commercial editions, but the underlying film stays in the public domain. So it’s like… different product versions, same public domain core.
Critical Reception — Then and Now
The film lands at 3.9 out of 10 on IMDb — honestly, more like the fair score for a $138,000 drive-in monster picture, with a real lizard on a miniature stage. Moria Reviews gave it a two-star rating and called it “a very minor 1950s giant monster film”, and also said it hangs out in the same wave of monster fare as Them! (1954), Tarantula! (1955), and Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957) but it doesn’t line up with their budget shine or story timing.
The MST3K slot, Season 4 , basically gave the movie its biggest modern crowd thanks to the riffing style. And then the Rhino box set release made it easier for the people who grew up on the show to actually find it. The Legend Films colorized double-feature release with The Killer Shrews positioned both pictures as curio items for genre completists. The Letterboxd community tends toward bemused affection: the “regional charmer” framing acknowledges the film’s limitations while recognising that its Texas production context, its musical interludes, and its nitroglycerin finale give it a specific texture that Hollywood’s comparably budgeted monster films of the period don’t replicate.
What the film actually has is provenance. A Top 40 radio pioneer who owned the screens it played on produced and narrated it. The man who replaced Frank Sinatra at Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra produced it alongside him. The director had photographed the Nuremberg Trials. The disc jockey in the picture was broadcasting on the radio station owned by the man who financed the movie. These things are not visible in the lizard-on-miniature-landscape footage. They are the structure underneath it, and they make The Giant Gila Monster a document of a specific moment in Texas media history that no one was trying to create.
Frequently Asked Questions — The Giant Gila Monster (1959)
Q: What is The Giant Gila Monster (1959) about?
A roughly seventy-foot gila monster terrorizes a rural Texas community, attacking a young couple, a train, and eventually a sock hop at the local dance hall. A young mechanic and hot rod racer named Chase Winstead helps the sheriff investigate, discovers the creature, and ultimately destroys it by loading his custom hot rod with nitroglycerin and driving it into the monster at full speed.
Q: Is The Giant Gila Monster (1959) in the public domain?
Yes. The Giant Gila Monster is in the public domain in the United States and appears on the List of Films in the Public Domain. It is freely available to stream, download, and share. The Internet Archive, YouTube, Tubi, and Pluto TV all carry it at no cost.
Q: Who produced The Giant Gila Monster?
Ken Curtis and B.R. McLendon produced the film, with Gordon McLendon serving as executive producer and narrator. Gordon McLendon was one of the most significant figures in American radio history — co-creator of the Top 40 format, founder of KLIF Dallas and the Liberty Broadcasting System, and owner of the largest drive-in theater chain in Texas. He financed the film as a co-feature for his drive-in circuit. Ken Curtis, the other producer, later played Festus Haggen on Gunsmoke for eleven years.
Q: Who directed The Giant Gila Monster?
Ray Kellogg directed and provided the original story. Kellogg was a visual effects specialist who had shot footage at the Nuremberg Trials as a US Army cameraman. He agreed to handle the special effects for the film in exchange for being allowed to direct — his feature directorial debut. He later co-directed The Green Berets (1968) with John Wayne and served as second-unit director on Cleopatra (1963) and Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970).
Q: How was the gila monster effect created?
The monster sequences used a real, live gila monster filmed crawling across a carefully constructed miniature landscape at reduced scale. The technique created the illusion of a giant creature by combining live animal footage with scale-model buildings, roads, and terrain. Letterboxd reviewers familiar with actual reptiles noted the animal used doesn’t appear to be a genuine gila monster — the species identification in the title is looser than the biology.
Q: Was The Giant Gila Monster on Mystery Science Theater 3000?
Yes. The Giant Gila Monster was featured in Season 4 of Mystery Science Theater 3000. The MST3K version was released by Rhino Entertainment as part of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 Collection, Volume 10.2 box set, and was also available as an individual disc. An exclusive interview with star Don Sullivan was included with the release.
Q: Who is Ken Curtis and what is his connection to the film?
Ken Curtis (born Curtis Wain Gates) produced both The Giant Gila Monster and The Killer Shrews in 1959 as a sideline from his acting career. He had sung with Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra after Frank Sinatra’s departure, performed with the Sons of the Pioneers alongside Roy Rogers, appeared in John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), and was John Ford’s son-in-law. He became best known as Festus Haggen on Gunsmoke, a role he played for eleven seasons from 1964 to 1975.
Q: Was The Giant Gila Monster the first film made in Dallas?
Both The Giant Gila Monster and The Killer Shrews — shot back-to-back by the same director, crew, and producers — were cited as the first feature films shot and produced in Dallas, Texas. Unlike many drive-in pictures of the period that received only regional release, both films achieved national and even international distribution through Gordon McLendon’s distribution network.
Q: Who is the disc jockey character in The Giant Gila Monster?
Ken Knox plays Horatio Alger ‘Steamroller’ Smith — a disc jockey character who was, in real life, an on-air personality at KLIF Dallas, the radio station owned by producer Gordon McLendon. His casting was a deliberate piece of cross-media marketing: the teenage drive-in audience in Dallas in 1959 would recognise the KLIF voice immediately. McLendon is also credited with inventing the Top 40 radio format at KLIF.
Q: Where can I watch The Giant Gila Monster (1959) for free?
The Giant Gila Monster is freely available on the Internet Archive, YouTube, Tubi, and Pluto TV. All versions are legal to stream and download under the film’s public domain status in the United States. A colorized double-feature DVD with The Killer Shrews is available from Legend Films for the highest production-value presentation.
Related Free Classic Horror and Monster Films
If The Giant Gila Monster (1959) sent you further into public domain monster cinema and 1950s science fiction horror, these are the natural places to keep going:
- Public Domain Cartoons
- Public Domain Horror Movies – Free Classic Scary Films Online
- Bird of Paradise (1932) Full Movie Review, Plot, Cast & Free Classic Romance Film
- Public Domain Movies List – All Free Classic Films (Complete Guide)
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