Talk about your 50's juvenile delinquents. This one makes Lon Chaney's Wolfman look well groomed. But it's not the kid's fault. Seems something unexplained fell from the sky and turned the boy into a teenage yeti with lockjaw. But Mom keeps him hidden away in her house, otherwise he has a habit of throttling people he meets. Just how she's managed that for years is one of the unexplained mysteries of teenage drive-in. But hey, I really like the twist with sweet little Ruthie. She's every guy's ideal prom date. But what a calculating little brain behind the charm. In fact, I'd say she's the real teenage monster. After all, our wolfman is more pathetic than evil. A good barber, a few skin grafts, plus a speech coach, might introduce him to semi-polite company. But I guess that's why the setting is back in the 1800's. Anyhow, Gwynne shows her acting chops as long-suffering Mom, while Gloria Castillo scores as Bad Ruthie. I just wish our grunting outcast got more screen credit, maybe the Drive-In Golden Comb for the biggest Elvis pompadour. Now don't laugh, but I take the movie more as a human-interest story than as a scare feature. Plus, it's a rather effective one, despite a plot with more holes than grandma's sieve and a budget of about a buck eighty including bus fare. It's also rather sneaky— that is, see if you think the moral scales properly balance at movie's end. After all, this is the straight-laced 1950's.

TEENAGE MONSTER was originally produced under the title MONSTER ON THE HILL, and was also known as METEOR MONSTER. Heading the cast is the former 1940s Universal star Anne Gwynne, trapped into a role she probably needed to meet some bills. The pretty Gwynne was known for such Karloff, Lugosi, and Chaney Jr. oldies like BLACK Friday, WEIRD WOMAN, and HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN. Here she starts out as a typical mother and housewife in the Old West whose life is thrown into turmoil when a cheap Fourth Of July sparkler in the sky (it's supposed to be a deadly meteor!) crashes down and kills her husband. Worse still is the handicap it leaves upon her little boy Charles: he's now a scarred and brain damaged brute.Zooming ahead several years later, we see the "teenaged" boy as he now exists since the tragedy: a six-foot-something hairy dimwit with bad teeth and shaggy hair. The boy was portrayed by stuntman Gil Perkins, well over age fifty and who himself was a former Wolf Man and Frankenstein monster double from the Universal classics of the 40s! For TEENAGE MONSTER he was made up by the once great Jack Pierce, whose new '50s get-ups were starting to look kind of crappy and rushed, leaving him looking like a cross between Glenn Strange in THE MAD MONSTER and John Bloom in THE INCREDIBLE TWO-HEADED TRANSPLANT.Gwynne tries to keep her mutant son hidden from the townsfolk, but junior tends to get into mischief by killing someone or something every so often anyway. Mom has also become wealthy in the aftermath of her husband's demise, and once a young waitress gets wind of the shady goings-on, she blackmails Gwynne by threatening to expose Charles unless she receives a steady chunk of change on a regular basis. She gradually gains control over the mangy halfwit too, sending her pawn out to dispatch people she doesn't much care for in the bargain.AIP actress Gloria Castillo (REFORM SCHOOL GIRL, INVASION OF THE SAUCER MEN) gives the best performance of the show as the greedy waitress. But Anne Gwynne also seems to rise above the material herself, given that she thought the film was the worst thing she ever did and even caused her to stop making movies (this was her final film). Indeed, there are some unintentional laughs here, the best example being the dubbed voice of the teenage monster. It was initially felt that Charles sounded way too articulate for a mentally challenged moron, so the decision was made to have Gil Perkins loop in some hysterically stupid whimpers and whines that never match the filmed lip movements. Even funnier is the fact that Anne Gwynne and Gloria Castillo still appear to be able to make sense of every grunt he mumbles! ** out of ****

Scifi Western Horror film about a boy changed into a werewolf like psycho by a meteor crash that kills his father. The only one who can control the boy is his mother who keeps him locked away when he isn't working in her goldmine. Of course she can't watch him and he gets out from time to time and kills or kidnaps members of the surrounding area.Give it points for being something different, I mean how many Westerns have scifi and horror elements? But at the same time you have to wish it was at least marginally better than it is. The acting is okay, about what you'd expect from b movie like this. The problem is the plot line is so full of holes that nothing makes sense. To begin with how could the teenage monster have wandered around for 7 years and no one have been the wiser? Explanations in the film don't ring true as much of the plotting. This is a real turkey of a film. (and it serves me right for trying a 50's horror film that was completely unknown to me.)

"It could have happened..." is the catchphrase of this movie. According to "legend", back in June of 1880 (somewhere in the Old West) a sparkler, I mean meteor, crashed near the mine of the Cannon family. Because of the crash, Jim Cannon (father/husband) dies and his son Charles gets a severe case of dirty face.So apparently Charles, becomes a giant yeti-like creature (I guess due to the meteor) who goes around killing indiscriminately (due to the fact that he is a child in a monster's body - think of Viktor from the Bride except with a worse vocabulary, diction and his jaw locked shut). During this time his mother has Charles continue to mine for gold, as she hides him in the basement. When gold is discovered, everything unravels (is there a greed destroys us all theme hiding in there somewhere??). Everyone in this movie seems to use Charles in one way or another, for their own schemes (even mom). You end up empathizing with Charles, simply because everyone around him is conniving and he is after all still a small boy (on the inside).I'm not sure what the merits of this movie are, except to a hospital ward full of insomniacs. It is quite dull, extremely slow and quite predictable. Thankfully this made for TV movie is only 65 minutes long.-Celluloid Rehab