Blaise’s Bad Movie Guide
The Giant Claw, Columbia Pictures
1950s creature-feature clunker
My household watched the live version of Grease on TV recently (I can sing “Summer Nights” as off-key as the next joker), and it put me in a 1950s frame of mind. So I decided to go back in time to that glorious decade, but to trade the Pink Ladies for the B-movie staple of that era: giant beasties.
As fate would have it, I recently picked up a copy of the DVD set “Sci-Fi Chillers” — an odd quartet of movies from Columbia Pictures. First, there’s the iconic Mothra. Then a pair of movies featuring the work of special effects master Ray Harryhausen: 20 Million Miles to Earth and It Came From Beneath the Sea. The latter features a giant octopus, but this particular cephalopod has only five arms (the poor sucker had three tentacles removed due to budget cuts).
Then there is The Giant Claw. In many ways, this movie is a typical giant creature feature. We all know the drill: You have to sit through a lot of blabbing from inept military personnel while waiting for the monster to attack. Worse still is the dreaded love story, which, when you were a kid, tended to put you into a coma. Claw has both elements to spare.
Aeronautical expert Mitch (Jeff Morrow of This Island Earth fame) is test-flying a jet when a UFO whizzes by. He calls it in and fighters are scrambled in pursuit. They find nothing, however, and everyone — even the lovely mathematician Sally (Mara Corday, star of Tarantula and Black Scorpion), thinks Mitch has flipped his lid.
Mitch doesn’t let this deter him from the task at hand, which is putting the moves on Sally. He attempts to make out with her while she is sleeping beside him on a plane back to New York. When she awakens, startled, Mitch spouts some baseball gibberish about coming out of left field and playing in the bush leagues. Sally responds that she likes baseball, and on and on it goes until, thankfully, another passenger tells them to clam up. Mitch also seems to have trouble with his pants. He tells an army general to “Keep your shirt on while I get my pants on.” Sally is intrigued.
But enough of this — we’ve come to see the big bird (you know, the one with the giant claw). Alas, instead of springing for stop-motion effects by Harryhausen, Columbia decided to go the dollar-store route and hired a low-budget special effects studio in Mexico. So The Giant Claw turns out to be a buzzard marionette of the lowest conceivable quality. I mean, come on! This turkey sprouts a tuft of hair that makes Donald Trump look like a master stylist. And what’s worse — it won’t stop shrieking annoyingly through its barely articulated beak.
We learn that The Claw is from outer space, is untraceable on radar, is protected by an antimatter force shield, and is capable of digesting a skydiver, chute and all. But while it can destroy both the Empire State Building and the United Nations, like all puppets, it has a hard time standing upright.
As you might imagine, the path to destroying the monster lies in neutralizing its antimatter shield and then blasting it out of the sky with missiles. Mitch gets caught up in the explosive mayhem and has his pants blown off, again.
Mankind may survive, but you, the viewer, might not if you try to make it to the final scene of this clunker. If you really need a ’50s fix, better stick with Grease.•
