THE CYCLOPS-1957-Susan Winter (Gloria Talbott) is looking for her husband who disappeared in a mysterious valley in Mexico. Along for the ride are the pilot Lee Brand (Tom Drake), bacteriologist Ross Bradford (James Craig) and Marty (Lon Chaney), a grumpy guy looking for uranium. They encounter some giant animals (lizard, hawk, rodent) and the husband now a 25 foot giant (Duncan “Dean” Parkin) with a radiation scarred face and one eye. He traps them in a cave and kills Marty. They make for their airplane while the cyclops is fighting a snake. Bradford throws a flaming spear into its eye and they escape.
Once again writer-director Bert I. Gordon makes a low budget movie about a gigantic man. Supposedly shot in 5 or 6 days Gordon did his best with what he had. Monster Dean Parkin played the scarred Glen Manning in THE WAR OF THE COLOSSAL BEAST the next year, a sequel to THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN (which Mr. B.I.G.made the same year as this; he also made the giant bug movie THE BEGINNING OF THE END in '57).
Star Gloria Talbot was the lead in DAUGHTER OF DR. JEKYLL the same year as this. Male lead James Craig was once groomed to be Clark Gable's replacement while the star was in the army. Despite having co-starred with Judy Garland in 1944's MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, Tom Drake film career never took off and he wound up mostly doing TV. Lon Chaney co-starred in the TV series "The Last of The Mohicans" around this time. He had a standout role in THE DEFIANT ONES the next year.
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