The 1958 film Teenage Monster opens in the late 1800s.  Gold prospector Jim Cannon (Jim McCullough) has got a nice little home with his wife, Ruth (Anne Gwynne) and their young son, Charlie.  One day, Jim and Charlie are out looking for gold when a meteor falls from the sky and crashes right in front of them.  Jim is killed, which I guess is an occupational hazard for anyone who works outside.

(Seriously, you never know when a meteor might crash on top of you.  There might be one about to slam into your home right this minute.  Read quickly.)

Charlie survives the meteor crash but he’s still bathed in radiation.  Ruth takes Charlie home and she keeps him locked up in a back room for his own safety.  Seven years pass and Charlie (Gilbert Perkins) is now a teenager.  Unfortunately, he’s a very old-looking teenager.  Standing nearly seven feet tall, he has long hair and a full beard and he can’t really speak beyond a few grunts.  Occasionally, Charlie manages to get out of the back room and Ruth has to look for him.  She understands that the 19th Century is no place for a radioactive mutant boy.

When Ruth discovers gold, she’s able to buy a house in town.  Unfortunately, living in town means that Charlie notices a young woman named Kathy North (Gloria Castillo).  Smitten with her, Charlie kills her jerk of a boyfriend and decides to bring her home.  Ruth pays Kathy to keep silent about Charlie but it turns out that Kathy has other plans.  Realizing that Charlie is in love with her and will do anything that she commands, she tells him to start killing people around town.

Teenage Monster may seem like an odd title for a western about a boy who gets mutated by a radioactive space rock.  Charlie is technically a teenager but he looks like he’s nearly 60.  The film uses the radiation as an excuse for Charlie’s rapid aging and his grown spurt.  Randomly blaming everything on radiation is one thing that B-movies of the 50s and the 60s definitely all had in common.  I suppose if space radiation could have brought the dead back to life in Night of the Living Dead, it could have also transformed Charlie into a teenage monster.  As far as B-movies were concerned, J. Robert Oppenheimer had a lot to answer for.  Of course, if this movie were made today, Charlie’s transformation would have somehow been due to climate change.

As for the film itself, it’s short and that’s definitely a good thing.  The idea of combining B-horror and the old west is an intriguing one but the movie doesn’t really do that much with it.  Yes, there are gunmen and deputies but they could have just as easily been modern-era outlaws and lawmen without really changing much about the film.  Director Jacques Marquette was a former cinematographer who went into directing so it’s a bit odd that the film has a flat, rather bland look to it.  On the plus side, Anne Gwynne gives a better performance than the material deserved.

Keep your kids away from radiation, everyone.  Other than cheap, clean energy and countless advances in medicine and science, nothing good ever seems to come from it.