The Giant Claw
Flying beast out of prehistoric skies!
Year of Release: 1957
Genre: Horror/Science Fiction
Rated: Approved
Running Time: 75 minutes (1:15)
Director: Fred F. Sears
Cast:
Jeff Morrow ... Mitch MacAfee
Mara Corday ... Sally Caldwell
Morris Ankrum ... Lt. Gen. Edward Considine
Robert Shayne ... Gen. Van Buskirk
Louis Merrill ... Pierre Broussard
Edgar Barrier ... Dr. Karol Noymann
Summary:
Global chaos erupts when an enormous bird from outer space ventures to Earth and begins killing scores of innocent bystanders in this awe-inspiring sci-fi thriller starring stunning Mara Corday and Jeff Morrow.
Four times faster than sound, the bird is bigger than a battleship and surrounded by an invisible radar-resistant shield which repels existing destructive devices. It's a race against time for scientists Mitch MacAfee and Sally Caldwell to devise a weapon against this abominable creature before it obliterates the United States.
Can they do it? Is there enough time? See for yourself in this terrifying adventure of man against monstrosity, produced by Sam Katzman and directed by Fred F. Sears.
Review:
The Giant Claw, remindin' us that back in the olden days folks hadda nuke their turkey without the aid of a microwave.
And speakin' of things that'll make your hair fall out, people're always tellin' me how I needa stop livin' in the past, and that if I'd just give modern culture a chance I might like it. This may sound familiar to some of you 'cause it's the same line your mama used to use when she'd put somethin' on your plate that made the whole house smell like the Jolly Green Giant's hemorrhoid surgery.
Sorry if that came out a little crude but it needed to be said. I know a lotta you're tryna your damnedest not to spit great-grandma Mildred's gobbler cobbler into your napkins right now so I'll try to choose my words more carefully from here on out; I just wanted to take a minute to explain to my critics that after enduring Thanksgiving dinner with Sadie Bonebreak's dad I've updated my opinion regarding the decline of Western Civilization and determined social media has officially supplanted reality TV and syphilis as the number one cause of societal decay.
Used to be ya had a civil disagreement with a member of your immediate family and someone either got owned or disowned and from then on the two people involved in the dispute had the decency not to speak to each other until one of 'em died and left the survivor a zinger from beyond the grave in their last will and testament.
Apparently those days are over, 'cause with the advent of Facebook we now have the opportunity to go rootin' around the internet lookin' for aggrieved in-laws to invite to Thanksgivin' dinner without consulting our spouses so everyone'll have somethin' to talk about on the car ride home after the pariah reminds the family why nobody's spoken to 'em since Desert Storm.
I only wish I coulda seen the look on Sadie's face when her ole lady told 'er she'd invited Sadie's dad for turkey, 'cause as far as I know, Sadie ain't said a word to the guy since he caught 'er makin' the sign of the sub-orbital paunch pancake with Patti Gast in high school and threw 'er out after finally realizin' she wasn't collecting back issues of Easy Rider for the carb tunin' tips.
Fortunately, by the time we'd all made it over there, Sadie had calmed down enough to stop screamin' obscenities into the spare turkey bag and bid us welcome.
"Alright, people, I'm not gonna mince words with you - my dad's comin' for dinner and some of us may not make it," she began.
"Fuuuuuuuugggg... I hate that guy," Cleave groaned, swiveling his head around and reacquainting himself with the house's exits.
"Why?" Roxanne asked, gatherin' up Shankles and givin' him a belly rub.
"Billy and I dropped by to drive Sadie to roller derby one night and the dick told us 'homos' to 'make sure nobody knocked up his daughter,'" Cleave laughed sarcastically.
"Oh," she replied, content to drop the subject.
"We got 'im back though, didn't we?" Cleave smirked in Billy's direction.
"'Fo dih," Billy chuckled.
"Is this something he's likely to remember?" Roxanne cringed.
"Can the chatter. Now we've only got a few minutes till he gets here so let's go over the ground rules: first, topics of conversation will be limited to SAFE subjects only - weather, sports, or automotive repair, understood?" Sadie snapped.
"Alright. How's this? 'Good to see ya, Wally. Global warming sure is makin' these winter get-togethers nicer, don'tcha think? I'll bet the warmer weather makes it a lot easier for the defensive ends to stand up after kneelin' for the national anthem. And was that a Prius I saw ya pull up in? Very environmentally conscious of you," I grinned.
"If Apollo and Shankles weren't here I'd feed you into the garbage disposal one limb at a time," she threatened matter-of-factly.
"Ranks for not rismemberin' my roommate, Aunt Radie! A rog sure would get rungry not havin' rumbody with thumbs around!" I mimed, movin' Apollo's lips along with the words.
"Everything's gonna be GREAT! You'll see!" Mrs. Sadie clapped excitedly as she knelt down to inspect the turkey through the oven window.
"'Grea' again,' I'ow beh," Billy rolled his eyes.
Sadie was about to move on to the lecture she'd prepared regarding audible bodily functions and how to avoid accidental embarrassment when the door rang and a pause pregnant enough to house the neonatal unit at Chickawalka General filled the room, leaving her just enough time to take one last cleansing breath and crush an R.C. Cola can against her forehead before turnin' the knob.
"Sadie," Wally said impassively. "You're looking... capable."
"Thanks. Come on in, kitchen's this way," Sadie motioned before introducing everyone.
"So, which one's yours?" he asked, shifting his beady eyes between Roxanne and the misses.
"We're a throuple," Roxanne giggled, sending Sadie's jaw down to around collarbone level.
"Yer a what now?" Wally asked, mashin' his face up into a Picasso painting.
"She's only kidding. I'm the one who invited you, Dad. Can I call you Dad?" Mrs. Sadie squealed.
"I guess. Already got one dy-- HEY! Those're them two faggots that put the badger in my T-bird!" he shouted, pointin' an accusing finger at Billy and Cleave.
"Ah whah'ow you gon' do 'bow ih, honey?!" Billy challenged, standing to demonstrate his 16" height advantage.
"Well I... spoze you punks've grown outta that sorta behavior..." he muttered before inspectin' his shoes and grabbin' a chair.
I'd like to tell ya that with this unpleasantness behind us we all settled down and enjoyed an uneventful holiday meal. I'd like to tell ya that, but given my Thanksgiving Day track record you'd know I was full of more'n mashed potatoes.
"Any of you people qualified to carve a turkey?" Wally scoffed.
"I'll get it," Sadie spat through clenched teeth.
"Okay, let's all get our stories straight - there was a power surge and the knife shot out of her hand," Cleave laughed nervously.
"So, how was the drive over, Dad?" Mrs. Sadie asked over the whir of the electric carving knife.
"Lousy. What kinda pinko outfit only lets a guy drive 70 on the intersta-- Jesus Christ! There's a possum in your trash can!" Wally shrieked.
"Damnit, Shankles, there'll be plenty of skin for ya in five minutes," I grumbled, tryna pry the little moocher's head outta the Stovetop box.
"You named it?!" he growled.
"Course I named 'im. How else is he supposed to know he's in trouble when he's molar-deep in some loudmouth's ankle?" I asked en route to the bathroom where I'd be spending the next several minutes combing the breading outta Shankles' hide.
"Oh! Hold on a sec!" Mrs. Sadie perked up before vanished into her bedroom.
"Shankles you've already met - this is Eve. We're breeding little ones for--" she was explainin' until Wally shoved Eve's nose away in disgust.
"What'n hell's wrong with you? Is this what you people do instead of havin' kids like normal people?" he snarled.
"No... we just wanted to..." Mrs. Sadie managed before the National Weather Service hadda interrupt coverage of the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade to announce a flash flood warning.
"Christ, what an asshole," Roxanne observed.
"So, you had no plans for Thanksgiving? I'll be damned," Cleave added.
"Why don' I walk you to yeow caow, Popf?" Billy offered, clampin' his hand over what remained of Wally's hair and jerkin' his head back to look 'im in the eye.
"I'd say it was nice knowin' ya, but for you bein' a douche supreme with a side of 'roid rings and all. So instead I'll just wish you a long, lonely, meaningless life. Go home and die mad. And hurry it up, our dinner's gettin' cold!" I hollered from the can.
"They speak for you, kiddo?" Wally turned to Sadie who'd since turned off the knife and hunched 'erself over the pan.
"Yeah. But that ain't all. I *like* who I am, and so do they," she pointed to the table.
"They're my family, and have been for longer than you ever were. Now get your pathetic, bitter, broken-down carcass outta my house before I call the Whoville PD," she instructed.
Mr. Hilliard was good enough to see Wally to his car (I swear on my word of honor that the dent in the trunk was already there), and once Sadie got her blubber half calmed down we all dug in and pretended nothin' happened, 'cause really, when ya think about it, nothin' important did.
We all felt kinda bad for Mrs. Sadie though. Both because of what happened and the knowledge that it'll probably keep happenin' given that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions and she's basically a walkin' asphalt spreader. Tell ya how bad *I* felt - I decided to forego the traditional dinner-concurrent turkey theater and put Love at Stake in the VCR to see if it would get the muscles in 'er face back to their pre-trauma positions.
That seemed to help, so once everything'd been sufficiently smoothed over I reached for dessert -- The Giant Claw -- one of only two Thanksgivin' turkeys *about* turkeys to grace a theater screen. A lotta folks rank this one right up there with Plan 9 from Outer Space and it's not hard to see why, 'cause although Plan 9 is more complete as disasterpieces go, The Giant Claw really takes pride in its titular monster and keeps that sucker on screen until you don't think you can take another second of the resulting stomach cramps.
Words really can't do this one justice, so I'm just gonna take a minute to give you good people an idea of what kinda insanity awaits by submitting into evidence three exhibits guaranteed to make you thankful for the meal you are about to receive.
First, the claw may get the glory, but chunkheaded paratroopers tend to meet their end inside The Giant Craw. Second, when your hope for mankind gets shaky it may help to remember that, after only 30 years of scientific advancements, we went from havin' to wait for outer space fowl to come to us, to yeetin' Howard the Duck down here from another galaxy. And third, it don't get much worse than bein' a skyscraper window washer the day after The Giant Claw parks on the Washington Monument.
The movie begins with a coupla scienticians monitoring the progress of a top-secret aircraft that we hadda build after we found out the Rooskies had clawed their way to within two generations of our current technology, only durin' the test the pilot (MacAfee) gets his air space violated by a hypersonic wad of dryer lint and General Halftrack hasta scramble every available inch of military stock footage to intercept before comin' up empty and orderin' his jets back to base for some totally heterosexual beach volleyball. Unfortunately, one of the search planes fails to return home and MacAfee gets called onto the carpet to have his nose rubbed in the PR piddle he just made until a report of a missin' airliner comes across the wires and Halftrack ends up havin' to send MacAfee and the project mathematician (Sally) to New York to explain how sorry they are for gettin' everyone riled up about the weather balloon that crash-landed after narrowly averting collision with a meteor in a cloud of swamp gas. The flight is fairly uneventful until their plane has a close encounter of the bird kind up around 13,000 feet, and after their engine catches fire they end up havin' to crash with a French Canadian seal clubber (Pierre) and charter a moose that can get 'em to Montreal International. Everybody bags their limit of Grey Geese as they await the authorities, but when the sun goes down somethin' spooks alla Pierre's French Quarterhorses, and when he goes outside to investigate he's reduced to a blubbering mass, swearing to have seen an unidentified flying ostrich the size of Prince Edward Island.
They finally get a flight back to the States, but on the way MacAfee puts a liplock on Sally while she's asleep and tells 'er the breach was her own fault for not havin' the latest virus definitions. She ends up callin' 'im out when he tries to steal second base, so he starts examinin' a map of previous airborne incidents and determines that if you're desperate enough to find a pattern you can draw a spiral not unlike the swirl of water in a dumper that'll eventually connect the dots and help you predict future encounters with the enemy, thereby solving the riddle and producing strong evidence implicating the Toilet Duck. 'Cept then the Roc smells what the feds're cookin' and eats the crew of another jet after they try bailin' out and that makes the Air Force so mad that they send a squadron of fighters up with express instructions to knock the bird outta the sky and to try to make sure it lands on a state with only one congressman. Trouble is, they don't realize Crodan is protected by a force field powered by its own anatomical absurdity, and by the time they figure out the pheasant's under glass it's too late and they all get turned into buzzard tacos. The Air Force shrugs off their latest defeat and insists the turkey be in the oven in time for dinner, but ultimately cooler heads prevail - giving MacAfee and Sally time to study the facts and see if they can't figure out how a living creature generates a shield to protect it from weapons with the same efficiency with which a Ford Pinto protects its driver from sex.
Fortunately, the military manages to recover a feather at the site of McAfee's plane crash and eventually comes to the conclusion that Scary Bird comes from outer space after comparing it to all the Indian headdresses from every John Wayne movie and failing to find a match. Then Sally realizes that the best way to catch a supersonic, anti-matter shielded, avian alien is to start thinkin' like one, and she figures the only reason to stop truckin' through the galaxy and pull over into a backwater planet like ours hasta be labor pains. Next thing, Sally and McAfee chopper back to Pierre's maple plantation, find the monster's nest, and start makin' omelets until Pierre breaks his vow to stand on guard for Canada and goes from metaphorical chickenshit to the literal kind in two bites. 'Course they still needa figure out a way to penetrate the billion-piece McNugget's shield and crack its wishbone, so McAfee and Sally start fartin' around with alloys and compositions and things with molecular structures until McAfee blows a hole in his fuselage while perfecting a device to pop the bubble and get 'em a shot at the pterocracktyl's giblets. Think I'll go ahead and cut this short on the basis that a picture's worth a thousand words (and in the case of The Giant Claw, it may be 10,000), but if you wanna find out whether the plane-mounted potato gun they rig up gets the job done, and you know you do, there're probably a few scientific institutions out there willing to pay to observe your reactions.
Alrighty, well, as God is my witness, this turkey can fly. You can't always pinpoint the precise moment where a movie goes from auspicious to asspicious, but The Giant Claw is one such flick, and that moment looks to have occurred when producer Sam Katzman decided a marionette manufacturer in Mexico City could handle a gig he had previously intended for Ray Harryhausen. There's somethin' really special about this one, because despite the stock footage warning shots being fired in the early going you're largely unprepared for just how sharply the film nosedives the first time the audience gets an unobstructed view of the monster. The acting's solid, scoring tolerable, sets cheap but nothing that sends up any red flags, and then, suddenly, without warning - meth vulture. I think that's what sinks its Mystery Science Theater potential, 'cause with the exceptions of a lotta absurd movie science in the last 20 minutes and The Giant Flaw itself there's just not enough to work with for a running commentary. The only monster ever put to film with the stuff to challenge it for the title of history's worst is the shag rug creature from The Creeping Terror, and strangely enough, both movies feature excessive voice-over narration. But in The Creeping Terror's defense, all the sound recordings for that flick were lost, whereas here you start gettin' the idea that it's being used entirely to pad out the film's runtime given the inconsequential nature of the events transpiring while it's happening.
Just the same, since this is the season of givin' thanks and all, let's not forget that there're a lotta guys out there who'da gone into that editing room, taken one look at that monster, and staged a series of pick-up shots that blur, obscure, and quickly cut away in a pitiful attempt to salvage their dignity - but not Sam Katzman. Granted, after having gotten a look at the workprint he probably spent a few minutes considering the practicality of ending his life at the hands of his Moviola, but when push came to shove he said the hell with it and sent that turkey to market and we're all better people for it. I mean, so what if Ray Harryhausen went on to become the greatest stop-motion animator of all time? Sam got his movie distributed, the knee-cappers he likely borrowed the money from got their investment back, and 65 years later the tragic flight of The Giant Claw has found its audience and its place in the Bad Monster Movie Hall of Fame. Mike Todd may've won the Academy Award that year for Around the World in 80 Days, but Sam won the hearts and minds of a nation, and that's worth a hell of a lot more than some gaudy brass hood ornament.
In any event, we'd better get this thing in the oven before I dribble too much sentiment and make dinner weird since I know most of ya have an aunt or uncle who look forward to doin' that every year and I don't wanna step on anyone's toes, so let's see if there's any stuffin' inside this turkey's ass or whether that cavity is occupied solely by its head.
The plot is a patchwork of absurd scientific jargon and constantly evolving supernatural revelations that suggest the screenplay was written by the denizens of a psych ward playing No True Schizophrenic. I don't claim to speak for everyone, but it seems to me that a giant, man-eating bird the size of a battleship is, on its own, more than capable of filling the requirements of your drive-in creature feature, but not these guys. It's hard to imagine this flick ever having a pitch meeting but I've got to believe it did because once you get five or six writers, producers, and financial backers with different motives together in the same room hashing out the details you can actually start to see how this thing happened.
The story starts out simple enough - humongous bird with little regard for human life or aviation technology goes gonzo. That's all ya need.
But hang on a minute - nobody's making horror flicks in 1957, so somebody else suggests the bird comes from outer space to bring in the sci-fi nerds who can't get girlfriends because their self-confidence has been crushed by day-drinking, overbearing mothers who hate that their sons spend their friday nights building HAM radios in the basement instead of going to football games and getting cheerleaders pregnant under the bleachers like God intended.
Well, that's just dandy, but space is a pretty big place, right? Why, it'd take millennia to move from one galaxy to the other, wouldn't it? No problemo! This sucker flies at supersonic speeds!
Now they're gettin' somewhere - Margaritaville most likely, but how does this beastie stack up against the legends? Is anyone really gonna take it seriously one year after Godzilla? And if you're gonna park it on top of the Washington Monument, what's to stop some ruggedly handsome, monosyllabic pilot from cruisin' by in a Lockheed Starfighter and givin' it the King Kong treatment with a coupla Sidewinders?
Oh, that. Do you really hafta ask? Bird's got an anti-matter shield radiating around it powered by triple reverse space nuclei that've come into contact with spectral protons from the Gamma quadrant that're resistant to the effects of quantum radiation left behind by the decaying orbits of collapsed supernovas - no weapon known to man can penetrate it. Of course, by this point, everyone's had between 11 - 17 Old Fashioneds and so they all nod in agreement at the soundness of this explanation before the producers instruct the screenwriters to move forward with the project on their way to the receptionist's desk where they proposition the increasingly uncomfortable young woman until their wives catch 'em and demand the foul temptress be fired.
I mean, approximately. There's really no point in dissecting the storyline any further, but it's also loaded with the usual mainstays of half-baked science fiction plots, namely, stock footage and voice-over narration inserted to kill time and/or add clarity to a scene that was found to be incomprehensible in post-production. In short, we're talkin' about a dumpster fire that can be seen from the ISS.
The acting is shockingly competent, with Jeff Morrow and Mara Corday each giving solid performances and making the most of the character-building opportunities leading up to the big special effects reveal that, depending on your point of view, either destroys or makes the movie. You can imagine Morrow's disappointment when he went to a screening of the flick and witnessed the unveiling of the monster in all its glory - at which time he seized the opportunity to sneak out of the theater while the audience rolled on the floor with laughter. But for my money, the best performance is that of Louis Merrill as Pierre, the hard-drinking cider fiend turned rescuer following the downing of Morrow and Corday's plane. That guy goes from happy drunk to petrified birdwatcher in four seconds flat and even pulls off the French Canadian accent convincingly. Now, you may well wonder what value this brings to the movie after a plot analysis that you may still be struggling to digest, but simply put - the film is just that much more amusing when the actors are putting on a good show, completely unaware that the finished product will forever occupy a prominent position in the cinematic hall of shame. You really would lose something if everyone in the flick were just phoning it in and giving a half-assed performance, and although it's kind of a minor detail given the unparalleled hilarity of the monster effects, the flick is more enjoyable on an ironic level due to the casting director's decision to doom these unfortunate souls.
Here's who matters and why: Jeff Morrow (This Island Earth, The Creature Walks Among Us, Octaman, Kronos), Mara Corday (Tarantula, The Black Scorpion), Morris Ankrum (Rocketship X-M, X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, Tower of London 1963, From the Earth to the Moon, Curse of the Faceless Man, How to Make a Monster, Giant from the Unknown, Beginning of the End, Kronos, Zombies of Mora Tau, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, Half Human, Invaders from Mars 1953, Red Planet Mars, Flight to Mars), Louis Merrill (Phantom of the Rue Morgue, Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars, The Black Room 1935), Edgar Barrier (Phantom of the Opera 1943), Robert Shayne (War of the Satellites, The Last Missile, Teenage Cave Man, How to Make a Monster, Kronos, The Indestructible Man, Tobor the Great, The Neanderthal Man, Invaders from Mars 1953), Clark Howat (Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, Lost Continent 1951), Morgan Jones (Forbidden Planet, Untamed Women, Not of This Earth), Benjie Bancroft (Star Trek III, The Andromeda Strain, Seconds, The Strangler, X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, Tales of Terror, The Unknown Terror, Captain Video: Master of the Stratosphere), George Cisar (Attack of the Giant Leeches, Batman: The Movie 1966, Billy the Kid vs. Dracula, The Werewolf 1956), Bud Cokes (Chamber of Horrors 1966, The Deadly Mantis), Leonard P. Geer (The Sword and the Sorceror, The Lord of the Rings 1978, Billy the Kid vs. Dracula, The Birds, Zombies of Mora Tau, The Werewolf 1956, The Last Planet), Dabbs Greer (Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1956, House IV, Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat, Evil Town, It! The Terror from Beyond Space, The Vampire 1957, House of Wax 1953), Sol Murgi (Have Rocket--Will Travel, The Fly 1958, Man of a Thousand Faces, The Night the World Exploded, Zombies of Mora Tau, The Werewolf 1956, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, Creature with the Atom Brain, It Came from Beneath the Sea, The Corpse Vanishes), Fred F. Sears (The Night the World Exploded, The Werewolf 1956), Robert B. Williams (The Bat, Satan's Bed, Teenagers from Outer Space, This Island Earth, Revenge of the Creature, The Mad Magician, Cry of the Werewolf).
And the slummers: Morris Ankrum (Lloyd Barnes in In a Lonely Place), Louis Merrill (Jake Bjornsen in The Lady from Shanghai), Edgar Barrier (Inspector Henderson on The Adventures of Superman), Morgan Jones (Commander Donovan on The Blue Angels), Benjie Bancroft (Officer Mooney on Dennis the Menace), Leonard P. Geer (Ollie on The Adventures of Spin and Marty).
The special effects you'll just have to Google. Nothing I can say will do them injustice. Only The Creeping Terror can match the shoddiness of The Giant Claw, but no creature in the history of film (at least none that aren't trying deliberately) can come close to matching its goofiness. And again, the tragedy (or triumph, given your personal perspective) is that Katzman originally wanted Ray Harryhausen to animate the creature with stop-motion before conceding that he just couldn't afford to do it. Katzman and Harryhausen had worked together previously on Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, and in fact, a few pieces of Harryhausen's work from that flick show up from time to time in The Giant Claw (building collapses, primarily), but one is really left to wonder how the movie would have turned out had Katzman been able to pony up the dough. Beyond the titular Claw, the film frequently utilizes small-scale models (the results of which are fair at best and two steps above Plan 9 From Outer Space at worst) and makes liberal use of rear projection that, in itself, would be considered adequate for its time were it not being used jointly with the aforementioned, unfortunate models. Pretty grim stuff when critiqued on technical merit, but completely without equal when viewed from a pure entertainment perspective. And I realize it tends to get lost in all the discussion over the marionette, but we should also take a moment to recognize the scene where the pilot lurches out of frame in his cockpit, slaps his face with ketchup, and then leans back to reveal the grisly damage sustained at the hands of his instrument panel. Magnifique.
The sets and shooting locations are forgettable and inconsequential right up until the Claw starts landin' on notable sites around D.C. and takin' a few floors off the top after struggling to stay aloft. The interior sets, while adequately furnished, are very cookie-cutter in nature and lack any sort of charm that could conceivably translate to a few easy points. That's not to say that they're shoddily constructed or sparsely decorated, but just looking at them gives the impression that they've been recycled dozens of times by equally impoverished productions that've been lost to time. Where the sets are concerned, however, what most people are going to remember about this flick are the miniatures that fall victim to the Claw's arial insobriety, and that's because they're of a quality akin to the buildings toppled by Godzilla and friends during the latter stages of the Showa Era when Toho was kinda losin' their yen for the series. Fortunately, this is an area where the flick's ineptitude gets counter-balanced by the amusement derived from watching a stringed puppet tear away bits and pieces of Washington Monument while the model sways back and forth as a result of its general flimsiness, but ultimately this is an area where the movie shoulda been able to score some cheap points and fails due to the bland aesthetic and poor production design.
The soundtrack, while no more bombastic than any other horror/science fiction title of the '50s, comes across like the musical equivalent of a jacked-up truck with 42" tires due to the absurdity of the plot and the butt-fumbled design of the monster. Admittedly, in those days the composer of a low-budget science fiction flick probably never got a copy of the script nor even a brief synopsis of what their music was going to be accompanying, but regardless of intent, the increasingly frantic strings and threatening brass scoring are absolutely essential to the enjoyment of the film, as they badger you into sticking around until that glorious moment when the Claw makes its appearance and you realize the severity with which you've been punked. I'm sure it goes without saying that as a musical composition created with the intent to convey terror and menace, you'll be hard-pressed to find a flick that fails to live up to its hype to this degree (with the exception of every film ever made that uses O Fortuna unironically), but at the same time, the soundtrack's insistence that you cower in terror at the feathered menace fluttering about your screen synergizes perfectly with the preposterous effects and gives it a great deal of entertainment value. Or, put more concisely, it fails up with great success.
Overall, I think The Giant Claw is a little over-rated by the trash connoisseurs of the world on the basis that its crap factor is inextricably linked to the monster itself and tends to drag a little when it's off-screen. Not quite up to the high standards of Plan 9 or Robot Monster, but better than quality contenders like The Beach Girls and the Monster, The Killer Shrews, and Attack of the Crab Monsters. Your mileage may vary, however, and if the sight of the monster puts you in stitches no matter how many times you see it this may very well be the disaster you've been dreaming of. Either way, it's a must-see extravaganza of bad decisions, so get your eyeballs on it at your nearest convenience.
Rating: 38%