THE RETURN OF GUILALA...AS A COMMERCIAL SHILL???

I was initially alerted of this by fellow giant monster groupie Mark G, but only just saw it for myself on TV this morning while waiting for the weather report.

Of the many delights found during THE 4:30 MOVIE's fabled "Monster Week" city stompathons was a non-Toho opus called THE X FROM OUTER SPACE (1967), a one-off giant monster flick featuring an alien critter known as Guilala. With an origin "influenced" by that of the Ymir in the Ray Harryhausen classic 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH (1957), Guilala was an extra-terrestrial life-form that grew from a tiny spore into a standard big-assed monster who did the usual "urban renewal boogie" necessary to propel a story in this genre, only distinguishable from one of its many brethren by virtue of being even more goofy-looking than the average man-in-a-suit leviathan. Guilala kind of looked like a chicken/lizard with antennae and a curved handle sprouting from its head, and a pair of thighs and an ass that would have been wholly appropriate for a KFC-lovin' trailer park cutie named Cameltoe Annie, but the icing on the cake is that the beast's corpulent figure looked like it was cobbled together from some delicious fried pork gyoza.

Guilala, as originally seen in 1967's THE X FROM OUTER SPACE.

As giant monster flicks go, THE X FROM OUTER SPACE was fun, if slight, stuff that would have been totally relegated to the back pages of rubber suit obscurity were it not for the monster's kooky aspect, but Guilala returned in 2008's GUILALA'S COUNTERATTACK (which I have yet to see, but would love to) and just recently as the mascot for, of all things, a high-end job search website. Check out the ad here.