31 Days of Cheese - Day 4 The Giant Claw

Returning to the 50’s today features what is by common consent one of the most ludicrous Giant Monsters of all time. The Giant Claw.

This is one of my favorite guilty pleasures, mostly for the absurd bird – along with wonderfully stupid dialogue said with a very straight face. Just B movie heaven guys.

This 1957 film has as good points, Jeff Morrow and the lovely Mara Corday who play the male and female leads. Jeff is some kind of know it all electronics wiz and Mara (who was a playboy playmate back in the day) plays an math and computer expert (yeah like they ever looked at good as her) but at least in this case she actually does something close to what her job other than be in danger or make sandwiches and coffee (which she does do as well, sigh.).

And apparently the writers had actually cracked a book or two for the science as they actually described something called a mesic atom – (now referred to muonic atom for anyone that is interested) accurately and they knew something about matter and anti-matter and how radar works. Of course the rest is just standard Hollywood pseudo science hoo-ha but at least they tried.

But the primary delight of the film is the bird – a totally absurd cheap as you can imagine effect that is supposed to be this huge menace to all of life on earth. Only if they are going to get sick from laughter. Jeff Morrow in an interview once confessed to sneaking out of a theater where he was watching the film once the creature came on and the audience started laughing.

What happened was a kind of negative Hollywood magic. The Producer, Sam Katzman was going to use Ray Harryhausen for the special effects (as for say Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and It Came From Beneath the Sea but the budget for the film was I guess even lower than those films (This seems dubious. Ray was very used to working under very limited budgets so it’s possible that Sam just was trying to cut even further. A cheap producer who ever heard of such a thing.) So Sam hired a Mexican Special Effects company to do the job (note to self, never hire a Mexican Special Effects company) and they came up the stiff winged hairy nostril bird puppet you see on the film.

Other Joys: the utterly stiff scientist Dr. Noyman who says things like “This bird is extra-terrestrial. No other explanation is possible. It comes from some god-forsaken anti-matter universe millions of light years away.” The extremely lame teen-age lingo in one scene and the extravagant use of stock footage including clips from 30 seconds over Tokyo of all things. And let us not forget the cliché French Canadian farmer who has a bit part before he is killed by the bird.

Truly this is just a dippy delight from beginning to end.

Enjoy with Hot Wings.