Monarch Books publishes the novelization Reptilicus by Dean Owen, a print adaptation of the Danish monster movie of the same name. 
Story: Reptilicus, one of the lesser known Kaiju, spawned an even lesser known novelization. Written by a prolific pulp author, the novel spins off in a wildly unexpected trajectory.
Review: Reptilicus is the greatest movie you’ll ever watch about a giant flying snake barfing over the Danish countryside.
What’s missing from the movie?
Sex.
That was a problem resolved in the novelization by Dean Owen. This deliriously bonkers movie becomes even more outlandish from the very first paragraphs.
Purposely, she had worn the tight, gray woolen dress so he would notice the breasts he had found so fascinating back in the Lapland village. On the jolting seat of the four-wheel-drive truck, Mrs. Jessyca Klint studied her handsome face in a pocket mirror. She moistened her lips, smoothed her dark eyebrows. Satisfied with her appearance, she dropped the mirror into her handbag. Then she shrugged out of her parka and laid it on the seat between herself and the grumpy old man who drove the truck. Old as he was he could not help but stare at the full-blown figure and he nearly ran the truck off the icy road.
And we’re off on a wild ride!
The main plot is the rivalry between two jealous sisters, one of whom is pining away for a lost love the previous summer. The other a man-hungry tart. Along the way we’re introduced to a sexually aggressive woman and her cuckold husband, characters who are disposed of quickly when their narrative purposes are finished. A virile American General and a comely UNESCO scientist. A father who embodies the mad scientist trope and is somewhat patronizing in the treatment of his aforementioned daughters. The night watchman, who seems was only included because his omission from the movie would have been obvious. Instead of the awkward comic relief in the movie, he provides an incongruous moment of existential self-reflection.
Oh… There’s a Kaiju in here, too.
The first half of the novel is waiting for the dug-up remains of Reptilicus to regenerate, the mad scientist part. While we wait there’s several sex scenes, including one of a women who has sex on her sister’s bed while she’s away (I would not want to be the psychologist who has to untangle the family dynamics). The sex in the novel is fairly explicit for a mass market paperback in the early 1960s. Pretty tame stuff compared to contemporary standards.
Fortunately, we are spared the road trip and musical interlude in the middle of the movie that grinds the film to a halt.
Giving credit where credit is due, the battle scenes with Reptilicus are written in a lean, efficient prose that punctuates the action effectively . The monster itself is given a menacing personality that heightens the stakes. Some of the scenes are gruesomely bloody. Among them, the death of the scientist’s assistant which is appropriately delicious. Again, fairly tame for a contemporary audience but still well done.
Literature this is not and it has no pretensions of high art. But it rips along at a feverish pace that situates itself well in the tradition of the men’s action novels that were popular at the time. Reptilicus the movie is a wild and weird entry in the Kaiju genre, mainly known for its ineptness. The novel toggles up that weirdness in crazy, unexpected ways. In the hands of a lesser writer it would have been trash. Dean Owen, though, makes this glorious trash.
Dean Owen is one of the pen names of pulp writer Dudley Dean McGaughey who wrote over 100 novels in in his career, mostly westerns, but also several adaptations of movies and TV shows. Proving you don’t have to be an A-List creator, his correspondence and manuscripts are collected and preserved at the University Of Oregon. In the case of Reptilicus, the novel is easily available for download at the Internet Archive, along with both the English and Danish versions of the movie.
Year: 1961
Authors: Dean Owen (pseudonym for Dudley Dean McGaughey)
Publisher: Monarch Movie Books
Pages: 143
Book review by Robert Parson