Terror filled Mondays.

This is a big week for terror filled Mondays. I skipped last week partially because it got busy and partially because I was getting this large entry together. It’s big both literally and figuratively!

Literally because there’s not one movie highlighted but three this week! Figuratively because of the subject of those movies.because of the flicks that are featured as part of Terror Filled Mondays - notice I said flicks! See, you can’t really talk about one of these films without talking about the others. That’s just the way it is with these particular movies - even though they were produced by different companies

Lt. Col. Glenn Manning, a soldier in the U.S. Army who suffers serious burns over 90% of his body following inadvertent exposure to plutonium radiation from a bomb blast. Manning miraculously survives the explosion and his burns completely heal, but the radiation causes him to abnormally grow into a 60-foot-tall giant. At this size, his heart is unable to supply sufficient blood to his brain and he gradually goes insane.

Nancy Archer, whose husband Harry (William Hudson) wants the US $50 million she recently inherited from her father so he can abandon her and live it up with his young mistress Honey Parker (Yvette Vickers). After catching Harry flirting with Honey during a Friday night dance at a local bar, Nancy encounters a spaceship carrying an extraterrestrial thirty feet tall who, we later learn, needs diamonds to power his “satellite,” as the craft is called throughout the movie.

Joyce Manning, the sister of Army officer Lt. Col. Glenn Manning, becomes convinced that her brother survived his fall from the Hoover Dam at the end of the first film. Along with Army officer Major Mark Baird and scientist Dr. Carmichael, she goes to Mexico to look for him... Manning is captured and drugged by the Army and taken back to America, but he again escapes and goes on a rampage through Los Angeles and Hollywood. Eventually Joyce makes him snap to his senses and realizing what he has done.

Two of the movies are connected since War of the Colossal Beast is the sequel to The Amazing Colossal Man but, did you know that the co-writer of The Amazing Colossal Man also wrote Attack of the 50ft Woman?

There are a couple of other little tidbits that might have escaped your notice, especially if you’re not a comic book fan. Could these comic tidbits that could be more than coincidence?

First off, could there be a connection between The Amazing Colossal Man and Deathlok? Notice that the surname is the same and both are military men:

Colonel Luther Manning, born in Detroit, Michigan, a soldier who after being near-fatally injured, awakens in the body of the experimental Deathlok cyborg in a post-apocalyptic future. He battles the evil corporate and military regimes that have taken over the United States, while simultaneously struggling not to lose his humanity.

Second, although I have yet to find it, if you look at that poster for the first movie, The Amazing Colossal Man I am positive I have seen a drawing of the character Goliath (Clint Barton) by John Buscema in the exact same pose. It slipped by me at the time but when I was looking at the poster today I suddenly remembered why it seemed all too familiar!

So, we’ve got three movies here about people who become giants, they’re all very much period pieces in that they couldn’t be made today but, that doesn’t make them any less of the delicious treat they are and certainly warranted of this week’s entry!