- Nightmare Fuel: The closest things we get to scares are the fact we don't see what the lizard DOES to its victims (bit of a letdown, but judging by the screams in the train, it wasn't pretty) and the trailer. Said trailer makes good use of its music and signature line: "You're driving a lonely road...You're as good as dead...".
- Nightmare Retardant: It can be difficult to find anything scary in the film when it's painfully obvious the monster is a normal sized lizard and it isn't even onscreen for more than eight minutes.
- The Scrappy: Chase Winstead. The film tries so blatantly hard to make him a Nice Guy that it's just annoying to see it get reinforced so much. Doesn't help how boring a main character he is or that most of the film follows him instead of the monster.
- Special Effects Failure: The props occupying the sets that the lizard crawls on are pretty obviously miniature models. It also turns out it's not even a real Gila monster, but the similar Mexican beaded lizard. They couldn't even get the species right.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The Giant Gila Monster is only in about eight minutes of the film.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/YMMV/TheGiantGilaMonster
FollowingYMMV / The Giant Gila Monster
Go To
