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The Cyclops (1957)--It's often pointed out that Bert I. Gordon's initials spelled out B.I.G., appropriately because his niche was making movies about people or animals turned amazingly colossal via clumsy rear-projection special effects. Most of these films are terrible; most of them are also entertaining. Christopher Nolan he wasn't, but Gordon did make a film that was a nod to a famous episode in The Odyssey, this 1957 saga of a one-eyed giant.
The beautiful, bob-haired, delicate-boned '50s scream queen Gloria Talbott leads an expedition--consisting of a scientist (James Craig) a pilot (Tom Drake) and a shady speculator (a vigorously hamming Lon Chaney, Jr.) into a remote, radioactive, forbidden valley in Mexico. She's looking for her fiance, who disappeared there a couple of years earlier. The group soon finds it's a canyon of horrors, with giant lizards and other creatures mutated by the uranium in the soil. Then they encounter a bald giant with a disfigured face and one huge, bulging eye. Who might that be?
Made to share a double bill with Daughter of Dr. Jekyll--a Gloria Talbott two-fer!--this movie is slight even by '50s low-budget sci-fi standards, and there's an unsavory tinge to it from the pre-humane animal action. Even so, the title character here, played by Duncan Parkin behind the memorable makeup, and with gratingly persistent groans and snarls supplied by the superb voice actor Paul Frees, has a grotesque pathos. And Homeric action asserts itself: the giant traps the party in a cave with a boulder, and he meets his waterloo from the proverbial poke in the eye with a sharp stick.
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