The Amazing Colossal Man (1957)

“Why don't you ask me what it feels like to be a freak?” – Glenn Manning

Let’s kick off this new incarnation of The Atomic Vault with a film that I’ve been curious about for a long time. I’ve seen some stills, starting from the first horror movie book I ever owned, A Pictorial History of the Horror Movie by the late Denis Gifford, but somehow never the movie.

I could evade the film no more. Driven to a state of desperation by the Coronavirus Pandemic Lockdown – I knowingly and purposely went on the hunt to acquire a copy of The Amazing Colossal Man on DVD for my collection. And now, I’ve seen it.

I was expecting a real clunker of a film, a turkey. A drive-in movie made on a dollar and loose change budget with wooden performances that could stun the audience from fifty paces. Boy, I wasn’t disappointed.

Our film starts at an atomic testing facility in the Nevada desert where the tension is mounting as some terse looking soldiers are awaiting detonation of the world’s first plutonium bomb. (Ah, here we go – unless I’m very much mistaken, isn’t plutonium a big ingredient of every atomic bomb?)

As soon as a fifties sci-fi film starts with a bomb blast, you KNOW the faeces are about to hit the ventilation system, mark my words. As the countdown continues – a light plane somehow makes its way to the blast site, ignoring all radio hails. The countdown’s going on – things are getting desperate; we’re literally gripping the arms of the couch when…. the plane’s engine fails and it crashes to the ground (or at least an unconvincing toy plane does) leaving the pilot either dead of unconscious. (Damn)

A brave soldier, Lt. Col. Glenn Manning (Glen Langan) defies his orders, heroically running out from cover to assist the pilot as the final seconds tick by to zero….and……

Nothing.

Looking around, confused, Manning stops… (why?)

Then he’s caught by the full force of the delayed blast, his clothes burnt from his body by the thermonuclear heat. This reminded me strongly of Stan Lee’s original comic book origin of The Incredible Hulk where Bruce Banner ran from cover to rescue a teenager who’d mistakenly driven on to the test site and got himself immersed in gamma radiation for his good deed. I wonder if Stan had seen this movie? We’ll never know.

Despite the plane and the pilot being disintegrated by the blast, Manning is still in one piece, though burnt to a crisp and isn’t expected to survive, as the news is rather heartlessly broken to his fiancé Carol (Cathy Downs).

But he DOES survive (but we all knew that because the film title’s kind of a major spoiler) and in fact, he has regrown his skin, though he’s now bald. He’s whisked off to a secret location by the army brass for further investigation, but Carol is smarter than she looks (fair play, she’d have to be…) and she tracks him down and talks her way onto the site. Sneaking to Manning’s room she finds he’s mutated into a 16 feet tall giant. But there’s a problem – Manning will die in a few days because his heart isn’t growing at the same rate as the rest of him. As the doctors explain the reason for this to her when they answer her questions “scientifically” in one of the most outrageous mansplaining scenes I’ve seen in a long time. The patiently delivered and hilarious explanation goes like this;

“Now, the reason for this is rather technical, Carol, but to give you a simplified layman's explanation, it might be explained that, since the heart is made up of a single cell for all practical purposes, instead of millions of cells like the rest of the organs of the body, it's reacting in an entirely different manner to this unknown stimulus or forces behind this whole thing.”

(Whoa – hold on. The heart is made of one single cell? WHAT? HAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA)

The bigger Manning gets, the more prone he is to bouts of petulant self-pity, wailing that he doesn’t want to grown any more, when he’s consigned to sleep in a circus tent. Though, army ingenuity has at least managed to preserve his dignity as he grows. At least his modesty is covered with an expandable sarong, as Manning explains. (Though it looks like he’s wearing giant sized Pampers)

Just as the scientists manage to devise a growth reduction serum (no idea how they know how much to give him) Manning wanders off into the desert. Yes, now around sixty feet tall, he manages to sneak off a heavily guarded super-secret army facility and strolls off. Even with a couple of helicopters, they can’t find him. Where does a sixty feet tall guy hide in a wilderness? But they need to find him because (oh boy, get THIS) they have a giant-sized hypodermic that’s full of the serum, and they have to inject him before his heart gives out.

Well, it’s the Nevada desert, so it’s inevitable that he’s headed for Vegas where he causes a little bit of cheap destruction, throwing a cardboard sign and an all too obvious toy car at a couple of cops and a handful of tourists. Before making his way to Boulder dam for his final stand.

In the film’s best and funniest scene (unless you count the one where he’s sitting in the middle of a dark road blubbering about his misfortune and causes a couple of drunk drivers to swear off the booze) the scientists catch up to Manning and manage to inject him in his leg with the giant syringe and press the plunger. Howling with child-like outrage, Manning snatches up the hypo, aims it and throws it like a dart, skewering one of the doctors.

He stands on the dam, holding Carol in his hand giving the unfortunate actress her Fay Wray moment, but he’s no King Kong (and she’s no Fay Wray). As soon as he’s persuaded to set her down gently, the army let loose and Manning is subjected to a barrage of machine gun and bazooka fire and falls from the dam, down to the waters below before we even know if the injection worked.

And that’s it – pretty low on the character development, the big action set piece was presumably the attack on Vegas which caused several dollars’ worth of damage, and we feel no sympathy for the character because he feels enough pity for himself – wallows in it, in fact.

Oddly enough, there’s a sequel. Watch this space.