Cult Cinema Saves The World
The Giant Claw is one of those movies that they say just have to be seen to be believed, such as the likes of The Godfather or The Lord of the Rings. There are those kinds of films where the story is riveting, the cast is a powerhouse, or the special effects are spectacular. The kind of celluloid dreams that keep you tightly in their grip, no matter the outrageous runtime. Well, The Giant Claw has none of that going for it.
The story is standard sci-fi mumbo jumbo, the cast couldn’t act their way out of a wet paper bag, and the special effects were made on the kind of budget usually reserved for a school drama club production of Cinderella. There should be no saving grace for The Giant Claw, but we’ll be damned if we didn’t love it anyway, despite all of these flaws. And that was because of one reason, and one reason only: Enormous Rubber Anti-Matter Space Turkey.
The year is 1957, and wanting to cash in on some of that good monster movie madness money that was doing the rounds, Cover Productions and Colombia Pictures hit on the idea of having a film based around a UFO, that was terrorizing the skies of the United States, and then the world. Because, as we all know, UFOs are always, inexplicably, drawn to the USA before they appear anywhere else on the planet. Must be all the Starbucks…
However, the UFO in question isn’t a hubcap dangling on wires, full of little green men, but is, instead, the aforementioned Giant Claw, an Enormous Rubber Anti-Matter Space Turkey, dangling on wires.
This massive bird is first spotted by Mitch MacAfee, an electronics wizard who has been hired by the US Army to help install and test their new radar system at the North Pole, while he is out flying a jet so the ground crew can make sure everything works. Oh yes, civilian Mitch isn’t just a whizz when it comes to electricity, he’s also such a good pilot that the American Military doesn’t think twice about allowing him to take one of their incredibly expensive fighters out for a spin because they have no pilots available that are qualified to… y’know… fly a fricking plane.
Anyhow, while Super Mitch is making his final run, he sees a shape that is, in his own words, the size of a battleship, moving at an amazing speed. This is his, and our, first glimpse of the Giant Claw, and just like John Cena, we can’t see it, as it is shown as nothing more than a blur.
We suspect that part of the reason for this is that director Fred F. Sears wanted to keep the audience on tenterhooks, waiting for the exact moment to reveal the awesome terror of the beast upon an unsuspecting public. But we also suspect that they realized that the Giant Claw was nothing more than an Enormous Rubber Anti-Matter Space Turkey, and tried to keep it away from the 70-minute film as long as they could. You don’t get your first proper look at the Giant Claw until around the 25-minute mark, and we fully expect you to have the same reaction as the crowd at the premiere of the movie, way back in ’57.
According to Jeff Morrow, who played Mitch, the cast was as in the dark about The Giant Claw creature as the audience was, and when it appeared on the screen the audience fell about laughing, and he snuck out of the theatre as he didn’t want anyone to recognize him, went home and got blind drunk. Truth be told, we don’t blame him.
The Giant Claw looks like something that Ray Harryhausen would’ve cobbled together in the throws of an ether binge from some garbage he pulled out of his rubbish bin, and there was a reason behind this. Shooting for the moon, producer Sam Katzman planned to hire the legendary monster maker to bring the Giant Claw to life, but due to the fact he didn’t have a pot to pee in, farmed it out to a studio in Mexico, who delivered a puppet on wires that would give Kermit the Frog nightmares.
But that is the beauty of the Giant Claw. Just look at it!
It has a perpetual startled expression in its lifeless eyes as if it had just gone for its annual prostrate exam, only to find out that the doctor has taken to using a foot-long wooden stick he found in the park to perform the procedure. It is the definition of so bad that it’s good, and, if truth be told, is the saving grace of The Giant Claw, which without it would have been just another sci-fi monster movie in a litany of sci-fi monster movies that came out around that time.
Is it terrible? Yes. Is it nothing more than an Enormous Rubber Anti-Matter Space Turkey? No doubt. But is it memorable? Of course it is. We doubt that anyone seeing The Giant Claw for the first time will not have the image of this creature imprinted on their brain for the rest of their lives. This is a useful ace to have up your sleeve if the rest of your movie is pretty damn average.
Don’t get us wrong, there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the plot or the cast of The Giant Claw, it’s just that it’s bog-standard for the time. The script is just another big ‘monster-kill-everyone-on-planet-Earth’ kind of deal, with enough pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo to cover up any holes in logic that the actors have to spout. While the performances on offer range from passable to couldn’t-act-your-way-out-of-a-wet-paper-bag. Oh, and there is enough stock footage on offer to make even the genius that was Ed Wood blush. So the fact that the Enormous Rubber Anti-Matter Space Turkey is a marionette and you can see its strings, gives The Giant Claw a special place in our black little hearts.
It flys around, it screeches a lot, it eats anything that it lays its bug eyes on—including a group of rowdy teens and their hotrod who broke lockdown and got what was coming to them, consarn it—it destroys buildings that inexplicably explode, leading us to believe that America makes its brickwork out of semtex which cannot be financially viable, and then it gets killed. What else could you ask for?
Is The Giant Claw a great film? No, not even close. So, is it a good film then? Hardly, unless you consider subpar writing filled with terrible special effects and things that go whizz and pop, good. Which we do. So we’re alright. But is it memorable? Well, if the sight of an Enormous Rubber Anti-Matter Space Turkey doesn’t fill you with childish glee, then we think that B-Movies just might not be for you.
But what do you think? Have you ever seen The Giant Claw? What did you think? Sound off in the comments section and let us know.
