The Giant Claw ** (1957, Jeff Morrow, Mara Corday, Morris Ankrum) – Classic Movie Review 2,902

Fred F Sears’s laughably simple-minded 1957 low-budget sci-fi horror monster movie The Giant Claw stars Jeff Morrow and Mara Corday as scientists Mitch and Sally. The mythical creature intended as the film’s showpiece is a hilariously poorly-made puppet.

Director Fred F Sears’s laughably simple-minded 1957 low-budget sci-fi horror monster movie The Giant Claw stars Jeff Morrow and Mara Corday as scientists Mitch MacAfee (Morrow) and Sally Caldwell (Corday). The mythical creature intended as the film’s showpiece is a poorly-made puppet.

The duo pair up to defeat the huge bird from outer space that flies at supersonic speed, has no regard for human life or buildings, and is threatening New York City and goes on to terrorise the world. Panic ensues on a global scale. Unluckily for the humans, the monster is big enough to attack fighter jets and pick up a train in its beak and has a radar-resistant shield to stop it being found.

So how did the bird get through the earth’s atmosphere without burning up? I’m no expert, but I think the gigantic bird ‘as big as a battleship’, turns out not to be from outer space at all, but comes from an ‘antimatter galaxy’ and has an ‘antimatter shield’. The film spends a lot of time explaining all this, but I couldn’t make head nor tail of it. It’s on You Tube if you want to check it out.

Thinking it over, probably a miracle of puppetry.

The Giant Claw could land comfortably in the So Bad It’s Good collection, because, with its incredibly daft giant bird monster, it is certainly quite bad enough to be really funny. Indeed, it is infamous for the shockingly poor quality of its special effects, which raise guaranteed laughs. Make no mistake, it is very, very bad.

On the other hand, it’s just an average Z-grade Fifties monster movie. Morrow (rather too mature for the role) and Corday give quite good, serious performances, though treating it seriously only makes it even more amusing, as they have some dreadful dialogue and situations to plough gamely through. And it’s mainly only when the bird appears that laugh-out-loud hilarity is the only possible response, though the bird appears an awful lot, and the film is funny for its entire 75 minutes. So, though The Giant Claw delivers Z-movie laughs throughout, it doesn’t quite reach the hysteria of Plan 9 From Outer Space. But then, what does?

Morrow first saw the movie in his home town but, hearing the audience roar with laughter every time the monster popped up, he left early to go home and drink.

The cheap and cheerful script is weak but is coherent and not especially terrible, though quite bad enough. The writers to blame are Samuel Newman and Paul Gangelin. The score by Mischa Bakaleinkoff is adequate, too, and effectively sets the mood and atmosphere.

The Giant Claw also stars Morris Ankrum as Lieutenant General Edward Considine, Louis D Merrill as Pierre Broussard, Edgar Barrier as Dr Karol Noymann, and Robert Shayne as General Van Buskirk. Also in the cast are Morgan Jones as radar officer Lieutenant, Frank Griffin [billed as Ruell Shayne] as Pete the pilot, Clark Howat as Major Bergen, George Cisar, and Robert Williams.

Morris Ankrum (as a rather cheery military man getting weirdly way too friendly with the hero) and Louis D Merrill (as the scardy, much troubled Pierre) are outstandingly bad. Pierre mistakes the menacing bird for La Carcagne, a mythical bird-like monster from French-Canadian folklore resembling a giant woman with a wolf’s head and bat-like black wings and which, like the banshee, is a harbinger of death. It turns out poor Pierre has reasons to be scared.

Both Sears and producer Sam Katzman are well known, even notorious as low-budget B-movie genre film-makers. The film was released by Columbia Pictures in a double bill with The Night the World Exploded (1957).

Because of the low budget, Katzman hired a low-budget special effects studio in Mexico City to create the mythical creature that was supposed to be the showpiece of the production, but the result was a poorly-made puppet.

Principal photography took place at Griffith Park, substituting for the New York-Canadian border, with interiors filmed at the Columbia Annex studio.

It includes special effects footage raided from Ray Harryhausen’s shots in Earth Versus the Flying Saucers. The crumbling Washington monument doubles for New York City skyscraper debris, and there’s even a split-second glimpse of flying saucer!

Mara Corday in The Giant Claw (1957).

The statuesque Mara Corday (born Marilyn Joan Watts on January 3, 1930) was a Playboy pin-up of 1958. She celebrated her 90th birthday on 3 January 2020. The American showgirl, model, actress and Playmate is a much loved 1950s cult figure.

She also stars in Tarantula (1955) and The Black Scorpion (1957).

After years of bootleg videos, Sony finally released the film officially on DVD in October 2007 in the Icons of Horror Collection – Sam Katzman, along with three other films he produced: Creature with the Atom Brain (1955), The Werewolf (1956) and Zombies of Mora Tau (1957).

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2,902

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com