AOTDI: The Giant Claw (1957)
A giant antimatter space buzzard stars in a drive-in classic that'll have you saying THE CLAWWWWWW
"Well, have a good time with your flying battleship. Your car will be here soon."
Possibly one of the most perfect concepts filmmakers have ever come up with. Here’s the pitch:
A mysterious UFO is spotted over the earth, but panic ensues when humanity learns that’s no moon not a UFO — it’s a giant, antimatter space buzzard.
Yep, buckaroos and buckarettes, you heard me.
A giant antimatter space buzzard with no regard for human life, architecture, or taste.
Some B-movies truly embody everything that makes lowbrow film great. This is one of those movies, and one of my all-time favorite monster flicks. It has everything you’d expect from a 50s monster movie, projected onto an 100-foot screen:
An utterly ridiculous monster — a giant antimatter space buzzard from (as the poster says) 17,000,000 B.C. (!)
The cheesiest of dialogue. Pure Velveeta delivered with the kind of sincerity and poise you’d expect from Shakespearean actors.
Zero budget practical effects that are still performed with gusto.
Intercut, seemingly-random stock footage.
A plot that has no pretenses, no illusions it’s anything but a giant monster movie, or anything resembling rational thought.
If you’re into monster movies at all — or want a good starting point for the American style of classic, late 50s drive-in brain rot? The kind of flick that’s perfect for making out with your date upon the front bench seat of a Buick — this is the one.
Even if you’re catching this one alone (and it’s perfect for reliving the glory days of the midnight horror/sci-fi double feature, with your favorite movie host), for all the nonsensical plotting, and all the incredibly groan-worthy effects, this movie is something magical.
It’s the cinematic equivalent of having your skull cracked open, and someone massaging your hippocampus with a hand buzzer.
Before we dive into the plot and what’s presumably going on in this anti-Lynchian fever dream — the details.
The Giant Claw (1957)
Up to now, only one man had seen the bird and lived. Among those who knew of it, its existence was a closely guarded secret. But even as arrangements were made for an emergency meeting of the President, the Cabinet, the National Defense Board and the Joint Chiefs of Staff - even then, the bird revealed itself to the world at large, and complacency quickly turned to panic! Panic, terror and horror! No corner of the earth was spared the terror of looking up into God's blue sky and seeing not peace and security, but the feathered nightmare on wings.
Tagline: Winged Monster from 17,000,000 B.C.! Big as a Battleship! Flies 4 Times the Speed of Sound! Atomic Weapons Can't Hurt It! Air Missile Strikes!
Studio: Columbia Pictures
Directed by: Fred F. Sears (The Night the World Exploded, 1957)
Written by: Samuel Newman (Mannix, 1967) & Paul Gangelin (Republic’s Serials, My Pal Trigger, 1946)
Produced by: Clover Productions, Sam “Jungle Sam” Katzman (Amateur Crook, 1937)
Starring:
Jeff Morrow (Union Pacific, 1958-1959)
Mara Corday (Tarantula, 1955)
Narrator: Fred F. Sears
Cinematography: Benjamin H. Kline
Edited by:
Score by: Mischa Bakaleinikoff (uncredited)
Filming & Sound:
Black and white filming, spherical process.
1.85:1 aspect ratio.
35 mm negative, 8 reels.
Mono sound, RCA Recording
Location: Mexico City, Mexico
Release date
June 1957 (United States)
Runtime: 75 minutes
Country & Language: US, English
Fun Fact: Some of the better effects are recycled from Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956).
Well, flying Battleships, pink elephants, same difference.
The Story:
Our story begins with scientist Mitch (Morrow) taking to the skies in a jet to calibrate a radar system. Because this is a movie, and we’re not wasting any time here, he sees something in the air. He says it’s big, about the size of a battleship. Is it a plane? Is it Superman? No! This time, it’s a bird.
But a bird that looks like a thrift store rug at 10,000 feet. But we don’t know that yet. It’s a UFO, and good, old-fashioned, all-American fighter jets are scrambled to take down the UFO. One doesn’t return, and a transport jet goes missing.
Now, obviously, this was years before the Japanese would invent the flying space battleship (Yamato), so everyone is at a loss. Heading back to the U.S. with Sally (Corday), our heroes encounter the UFO again, this time getting knocked off course — and out of the air.
The pilot is killed, but Mitch and Sally live to fight another day. One of the standout jobs with effects in this movie (as the SFX go. Don’t get your hopes up too high) is actually with the crash itself. Cheesy, yet fabulous. You also get the classic “throw ourselves flat onto the ground with explosion,” effect.
An interesting side note — Morrow was, actually, a classically-trained actor. He was one of the better actors in the era, and not quite so prone to chewing scenery and behaving like a Christmas ham. His performance here is classic for the genre — the square jawed action man that would dominate the genre into the mid 60s.
Mitch and Sally’s crash is punctuated by some poor production assistants tossing a few pieces of actually-burning sheet metal at the stars. Make of that what you will.
They crash near a cabin, finding a friendly face in a fellow named Pierre (Louis D. Merrill) who shares his homemade hooch with them and fills them in on The Giant Claw, which (of course) in Quebecois is la carcagne. He then has flashbacks of his encounters with the Claw, incapacitating him.
At this point, our heroes head to D.C. to fill the government in on this new threat. You also get a classic late 50’s sex scene — that’s entirely made of baseball metaphors and awkwardly making eyes at each other. Ah, young love among the space buzzards.
Managing to not die at the hands of flaming sheet metal or sheer awkwardness, they meet with top brass General Buskirk (the eternal stern old man, Robert Shayne) and manage to wrangle him into sending a crack team of airborne investigators — and they discover that:
A. There’s a giant space buzzard from 17,000,000 B.C. aboot flying around causing mayhem.
B. This space buzzard has an antimatter shield that deflects all their attempts to combat it (oh no!).
How do they eventually beat it? The most logical thing you can imagine.
They stuff a low-yield nuke into the carcass of a cow, set it out, and wait for the bird to get hungry.
The Backlot:
You can’t talk about this movie without talking about how utterly insane the special effects are.
It’s apt that Fred Sears and Paul Ganglin were on board — two veterans of the Republic Serials of the 1930s. For a 1950s kid, it would’ve looked very familiar. Incredibly low-budget, roughly zero attention to detail, and the kind of filming that makes Ed Wood look worthy of an Oscar.
In one scene, what’s clearly a B-25 model is attacked by the bird, that looks like a glorified sock puppet with intense googly eyes. There’s a second battle with the military’s best plastic jet fighters that looks equally ridiculous. And then, our crack editors (both of whom would go on to very long careers — as would the main cast ) intercut what seems to be WWII newsreel footage of a flaming aircraft dropping from the sky, into the sea.
Needless to say, it’s the kind of film Michael Bay or J.J. Abrams would kill to remake.
Life Lessons:
Beware the googly-eyed giant antimatter prehistoric space buzzards.
French Canadians are deathly afraid of Mexican food.
Considering how often
our real herothe monster is compared to a battleship, we Americans will measure with anything but the metric system.Science machines and equipment explode with they don’t work.
When is a pattern not a pattern? When it is a spiral.
From space, all countries are conveniently illustrated in different colors.
How about it, my Drive-In Monsters? Have you caught this one yet? If you’re a fan of cult classics or — like me — just really love obscure, underrated movies (even if they’re so bad, they’re classics), you can pick up The Giant Claw right here for your next movie night. If you do, I’ll get a small commission at no extra cost to you.
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Til next time, creatures of the night —
Happy tails