Project Terror The Giant Gila Monster

Tonight, on Project Terror, The Giant Gila Monster. When I was a kid growing up in the 1970s and 1980s in San Antonio, TX, I loved staying up late on Friday Nights to watch the broadcast of the local horror show "Project Terror." They featured a different horror and/or monster movie every week. Sometimes they had double features...
The Giant Gila Monster is an American 1959 monster film directed by Ray Kellogg and produced by Ken Curtis. A famous B-movie of the era, the film stars Don Sullivan, a veteran of several low budget monster and zombie films, and Lisa Simone, the French contestant for the 1957 Miss Universe, as well as comedic actor Shug Fisher and KLIF disc jockey Ken Knox. The effects included a live Mexican beaded lizard (not an actual Gila monster) filmed on a scaled-down model landscape.
A gigantic, mutated Gila monster begins stalking a rural Texas community. Young couple, Pat (Grady Vaughn) and Liz (Yolanda Salas), are attacked by the creature while parked in their vehicle overlooking a ravine, sending the car crashing into the ravine below. Local sheriff (Fred Graham) launches a search for the missing couple, assisted by their friends, including Chase Winstead (Sullivan), a young mechanic and hot rod racer. Chase locates the crashed car in the ravine, the inside smeared with blood and the couple nowhere to be found.
Meanwhile the creature continues its attacks, eating livestock and crashing an oil tanker, before eventually destroying a bridge, causing a major train accident. Only after this do the authorities realize that they are dealing with a giant venomous lizard. By this time, emboldened by its attacks and hungry for prey, the creature attacks the town. It heads for the local dance hall, where the town's teenagers are gathered for a sock hop. In an effort to stop the monster, Chase packs his prized hot rod with nitroglycerin and rigs it to speed straight into the Gila monster, killing it in a fiery explosion and heroically saving the town.