The Cyclops 
                                           
Director: Bert I. Gordon
Year: 1957
Rating: 4.0
There is cheap and then there is The Cyclops. It was made in five days and looks like it was made in four. It was the third film for director Bert I. Gordon who was to make a career of producing low budget monster films. This was for AIP and they gave him a budget for a boy scout outing. Considering that, Gordon makes an ok film and manages to hire four actors who are known in the world of B films - Lon Chaney Jr, James Craig, Gloria Talbot and Tom Drake. With those four, a botanic garden, a cave, a hideous mask and lots of back projection, he makes a 66-minute film that was released along with The Daughter of Dr. Jekyll (also starring Talbot). That might have been fun. The days before CGI. If you could not afford stop motion for your giant monsters, you used back projection. It was way more convincing I would guess if you were 10-years old. Though I wonder what ten-year old boys thought when Talbot gets out of the water wearing one of those 1950's pointy bras under her wet clingy shirt.



Talbot is in Mexico looking for her fiancé who crashed in an isolated part of Mexico three years previously. She flies to the crash site with the three men mentioned above - Drake (the pilot), Chaney Jr. looking for uranium (and apparently drunk for most of the shoot and looking it) and Craig hoping to find his old friend dead so that he can marry Talbot, especially, after seeing her getting out of the water. Friend? What friend?




Chaney is nuts and at one point knocks out the pilot - when he is flying the plane - but no one seems too perturbed by this. Once on the ground his scintillator used to find radioactivity goes off the map - everything is radioactive - and you know what that means. Giant monsters! Giant lizards, birds, snakes - and a giant man with one eye and a mutated melty looking face that you would never invite to dinner. Chaney may be nuts but he is the only one with the sense to want to get out - Talbot keeps saying he must still be alive - that is when she is not screaming - and of course he is. You found him honey. Just how much do you love him? Will you take him home to meet your parents?