Teenage Monster (1958)

Teenage Monster (aka Meteor Man) (1958) is part of that small group of films comprising the science fiction/horror/western crossover sub-genre, which include Billy the Kid Versus Dracula and Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter (both 1966).  You can see the attraction to film-makers: the use of standing western sets, costumes, props and locations meant considerable budget savings.  Moreover, the familiarity of the setting would probably make audiences more receptive to the fantastical elements, while the juxtaposition of such elements with the historic setting would give the whole production a bizarre touch and provide a novel marketing angle.  It has to be said, however, that very few of these films actually worked that well, with the supernatural/science fiction and western elements stubbornly refusing to mix.  Not even the more recent, big budgeted Cowboys and Aliens (2011) failed to set the box office on fire.  There are exceptions: the sixties TV series The Wild, Wild West successfully mixed steampunk-style science fiction with a Western setting, while there have been a number of movies which have drawn upon Native American supernatural elements rather than the Gothic tradition, with some success.  Getting back to Teenage Monster, it is possibly the most basic representative of this sub-genre, its science fiction elements are minimal, existing solely to provide an excuse for having the title monster wandering around the Old West.

In time honoured fashion, one of those mysterious meteorites falls to earth, killing a gold miner and burning his young son.  Not surprisingly, the son mutates into a mumbling hairy simpleton, who wanders around killing people.  He is protected by his mother, who keeps him out of sight of the local townsfolk by having him work  the mine. Eventually, his sporadic killings attract too much attention, so she moves with him to a house closer to the town, where she hopes she can tame his animalistic urges.  Things are complicated when a local girl stumbles on their secret and tries to blackmail the mother who, instead, persuades her to be her son's paid companion, to try and help humanise him.  Naturally, the son falls for the girl, who proceeds to use him for her own purposes, killing an unwelcome suitor for her.  The Sheriff, (who has the hots for the mother), gets suspicious, the monster turns against the girl and we get a mini-King Kong scenario with the beast taking her to the top of a mesa - then throwing her to her death before being gunned down by the Sheriff and his Deputy.  It's all very small scale and clearly hastily shot on a tiny budget, with no major special effects to speak of and some very generic hairy make-up for the monster.  The film was produced and directed by Jacques R Marquette to provide a co-feature for another film his company had produced, The Brain From Planet Arous (1958).

It gives some idea of how poor Teenage Monster is that it makes The Brain From Planet Arous look good - and Brain From Planet Arous is pretty bad.  Nevertheless, despite being a bad movie, the latter at least has a suitably bizarre concept and some quite entertainingly created giant interstellar brains with eyes floating around.  It also has a couple of decent B-movie stars in John Agar and Robert Fuller, whereas Teenage Monster can muster only the always welcome presence of Anne Gwynne, (who had starred in a number of horror B-movies, including House of Frankenstein (1944), in the forties), as the monster's mother.  The film's biggest problem is that it never properly exploits either its science fiction or its Western elements - the monster could just as easily been a regular psychopath and the setting could just as well have been the present day.  Ultimately, it just comes over as bland but, at just over an hour in length, it is at least relatively painless.  Shot under the title The Monster on the Hill, the release title of Teenage Monster was clearly an attempt to cash in on the popularity of films like I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957) and tap into the teen drive-in market.