When you’re trying to do something like an A to Z horror movie binge, it pays to lob yourself a softball every now and then. Ideally, you like to find some semi-obscure stuff that no one’s ever heard of, not a universally-derided feature that doesn’t really need another thousand words dropped on its misshapen head, but here we are.
Besides, I hadn’t watched it in years, and when I mentioned it to a fellow Crapfest devotee, the response was “The what?” so maybe this is a good* choice after all. (*good not guaranteed)
For those of you in the “what?” category: Jeff Morrow is two-fisted electrical engineer Mitch MacAfee, who sights an enormous fast-traveling UFO while calibrating a new radar system. Military brass continue to poo-poo his sighting even after numerous planes start disappearing. Eventually it is confirmed that the UFO is actually an enormous bird from outer space, and conventional weapons are useless against it because it is surrounded by a field of anti-matter (like a lot of late 50s sci-fi monster movies, it is best to not ponder the “science” part overmuch).
MacAfee, being a two-fisted electrical engineer, quickly masters theoretical physics and creates a gun that will fire mu-mesons at the anti-matter field, rendering the bird vulnerable to rockets and plunking it’s dead ass in the sea. The end.
Mara Corday is on hand as MacAfee’s love interest Sally Caldwell, a mathematician he meets while testing that radar system. Like Morrow, she had already cemented her genre bona-fides with movies like Tarantula and The Black Scorpion. Morrow and Corday have some good chemistry when they’re allowed to, as when they are wading through some sub-Hawksian banter. Except for the fact that she actually responds favorably to MacAfee’s abrupt and rather uncomfortable two-fisted electrical engineer romancing, Caldwell is a fairly progressive character; she’s the only one that realizes the reason why the Claw has come to Earth is more important than the how to get rid of it, doesn’t hesitate to pick up and use a high-powered rifle (“I was born in Montana.”), and is essential in the rapid development of the mu-meson gun. Hell, the mu-meson gun was probably her idea.
So there’s the building block of a perfectly good late 50s sci-fi monster flick – good grief, it even has Morris Ankrum as a general! The script, however, seems more interested in the sub-Hawksian banter than in actual storytelling – it falls back on the crutch of narration too often. But where the movie runs off the rails and starts plowing through populated areas with no sign of stopping is in the production itself, courtesy of semi-infamous producer Sam Katzman.
Legend has it that the original plan was have Ray Harryhausen provide a stop-motion Claw, which proved too expensive for Katzman’s taste. He outsourced the work instead to a Mexican puppet maker for the lordly sum of 50 bucks, and there was ever an illustration for You Get What You Pay For, this monster is it. (also didn’t stop Katzman from lifting clips from Harryhausen’s Earth vs the Flying Saucers)
Jeff Morrow was famously mortified when he finally saw the finished version of the movie, slinking out before it ended to avoid facing anyone. I can only imagine what that felt like, being told told during shooting that he was reacting to something absolutely horrible, only to later find out it was the wrong kind of horrible.
I long held that the failure of The Giant Claw was exclusively due to this cartoon turkey buzzard, and one of my Lottery-winning fantasies was to pay, say, WETA Workshop to produce better, scarier bird sequences and restore Claw to its rightful glory. My rewatch, however, proved that movie itself is too flawed for even that to help. There are several legitimately excellent sequences (the bit with the Claw scooping up helpless parachutists with a loud crunch! properly horrified me at ten years of age), but so, so much drivel propping them up it is, alas, a lost cause.
Which is why I love it.
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