With my little foray into Tokusatsu it’s time to return to the regular schedule. So what classic Sci fi will I look into. Well black and white movies are usually fun. Big monsters are fun. Let’s look into one that has a bit more going for it with Bert I Gordon’s The Amazing Colossal Man.

The Amazing Colossal Man is a black and white science fiction movie by Bert I Gordon (whose initials give rise to the idea of Nominative determinism) as he’s known for movies featuring big things. These sadly aren’t your imaginative Kaiju or other giant monsters, but usually regular sized things increased in size to be giant. You can see this for example with other works by him like Food of the Gods, and it being the film that all the other adaptations and sequels tend to copy from ignoring the rest of the book much like the film did, so just constant giant rats…. but that’s going a bit too much onto a tangent, onto the film.

The Amazing Colossal Man stars Lt. Colonel Glenn Manning played by Glenn Langan. The film starts with him and a unit sent to witness a new Plutonium bomb explosion. But when a plane crashes in the exclusion zone he rushes to try and save them but is caught in the explosion (this is basically the origin of the incredible hulk when you think about it). While he doesn’t die the outlook is bleak from the doctors given the huge burns he faces and they are honest to his fiancé Carol Forrest played by Cathy Downs. However not only does Glenn survive his skin looks renewed minus the loss of his hair. But soon all records of him being at the hospital vanish and no one will tell Carol what happened.

So Carol rather easily breaks into an army base and discovers that Glenn has become a giant and is getting larger. The strength of the film comes not from the scenes of the giant Glenn, but the acting of … well Glenn. We see him break up as while huge he feels more and more isolated, all the while a pain in his chest grows that threatens to strip away his sanity. We do get a scene of him walking through a built up area later but I would put the earlier sequences as better since it makes us feel more invested in the character.

In terms of B movies, this is definitely above average thanks to the emotional investment in the character of Glenn. This all happened because he tried to save someone and now he’s slowly losing himself while being seen as a monster.

There was a sequel, but since that reduced the main character to a monster you lose so much of what made this one worth watching… also they got rid of his fiancé and replaced her with a sister that the original specifically mentioned he didn’t have.

Rating: 🧌🧌🧌