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Lizards in Movies   Gila! (2012)   Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.   This is a TV movie remake of the cult classic The Giant Gila Monster (1959) that is set in the 1950s. If you thought the first one was bad, wait until you see this one. It has a few the same elements - drag racing teenagers, a disabled little girl, 1950s rock music, and the same cheesy song at the end, and it adds some new side-plot elements, including a randy female sheriff's deputy, a gun nut, and an unhinged ex-townie who comes back to get revenge on the town, but the main difference is that the monster, instead of being a live lizard photographed on a scaled-down set, is CGI. Really bad CGI. So unrealistic that it's hard to believe that it's real let alone a dangerous monster. It takes place in a small town in Indiana and it's almost Christmas, but nevertheless a Gila Monster, a lizard that lives in the deserts and is only active when it's warm, is running around in December, foraging for food and getting ready to lay its eggs and hibernate. That's about all we learn about it. They don't even try to explain how it grew so unnaturally large, though radiation is suggested, along with mutation, communist animal tests and Martians. The lizard's hiding place is a tunnel in an old quarry where someone has dumped barrels full of toxic chemicals, so that might be the cause of the mutation, but it's never confirmed. When we see men dumping a barrel of chemicals in the lizards in a tunnel in an old quarry where the lizard hides out, the lizard smashes the barrel with its tail and the chemicals burn the skin off their faces. Like the lizard in the first movie, the giant lizard has been eating cattle along with people, but it doesn't eat everybody it kills, which seems like a waste of food. The giant lizard looks even less like a real Gila Monster than the lizard in the first movie. One weird thing about the monster is that we see it use its tongue to catch the deputy as she is running away from it and then pull her into its mouth. It also survives a head-on collision with a speeding train without a scratch while the train explodes into flames, but it can't survive a hot rod full of nitroglycerine, just like the first movie monster.