"And the sign said 'Long-haired freaky people/Need not apply...'"
In 1880, somewhere in the Southwestern United States, an unexplained meteor crashes near a mine where young Charlie Cannon's gold prospector father works. Charlie's father is killed instantly, and Charlie, who was stopping by to visit, ends up exposed to the radiation from the meteor, which has the effect of horribly mutating him and causing him to age and grow alarmingly fast. Charlie's mother convinces the town that her son is dead, raising him in secret for the next seven years, during which time her late husband's mine has yielded a considerable windfall of gold. She buys a house in town and hopes to keep Charlie's existence quiet, but Charlie is now roughly 17 or 18 years old and stalks the local countryside, terrorizing or outright murdering locals. Judging by the evidence on display, Charlie either never matured past the mental level he had reached when irradiated/mutated or was rendered severely mentally ill by the event, as he communicates in semi-intelligible gibberish (which gets annoying really quick) and can be reasoned with and even commanded, but his murderous urges are too strong and it's only a matter of time before the shit hit hits the fan for the childlike titular creature. During one of his day-for-night rampages, Charlie kills the abusive gambler boyfriend of Kathy, a pretty local whom he first scares the living shit out of but soon takes quite a shine to. (More in a puppy dog infatuation way rather than any grow-up lusty urges.) His mother pays Kathy to keep silent about Charlie's existence, as well as hiring the girl to act as a companion for Charlie and be nice to him. What Charlie's mother did not count on was that beneath her sweet girl-next-door veneer, Kathy is in actually a heartless blackmailing manipulator who soon has control over Charlie, whom she freely deploys as her personal one-man hit squad. Kathy not only uses Charlie for nefarious purposes, she also extorts cash from Charlie's mom in order to fund her dreams of moving away and living the high life in a glamorous big city. In short, poor Charlie is a victim of baleful urges that he cannot control, is easily manipulated by seeming kindness and a pretty face, and inevitably meets his fate when he finally twigs to Kathy true vile nature.
Though heavily steeped in trashy, cheap B-and-Z-grade horror flicks since I was in diapers, somehow I had never heard of TEENAGE MONSTER until I stumbled upon it for free online the other day. I added it to this year's roster, and what I got was a film that was the very definition of scare-free mediocrity that was also very much a product of its era in mid-20th Century American pop culture. It was released in the late 1950's, when movies and television were absolutely dominated by westerns, so what we have here is an ultra-low-budget western cross-pollinated with a "teen" horror flick along the lines of I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF and I WAS A TEENAGE FRANKENSTEIN, only bearing none of the fun nor the entry level scares of those two superior efforts. As horror goes, this one's a tepid dud, wearing its western trapping very prominantly on its sleeve, but even by the standards of the most lackluster television westerns of the era (and there were far too many to attempt to count), TEENAGE MONSTER is about as tepid as it gets, with the sole interesting element in the narrative being when Kathy turns out to be a villain of the foulest order. I was raised in. a western-loving household during the ass-end of the genre's dominance on TV, by which time dozens of the classic idiot box oaters had been put out to pasture in syndication, thus ensuring that kids my age got to see them, so with that experience in mind, TEENAGE MONSTER played to me like a forgettable episode of damned near any 1950's-era frontier drama, only with a "monster" that looked like Charles Manson and Larry Talbot had an illicit tryst behind a dumpster at a local Piggly Wiggly and Charlie was the resulting crotch fruit.
To make things perfectly clear, I only watched this one because I had never heard of it. I did not expect to get a dull western disguised as a delinquency-era monster movie, and what I got can kindly be deemed instantly forgettable. If you skip this one, you miss nothing.
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