For today's Halloween clip, I thought long and hard about what to post. But as luck would have it, I just watched "The Giant Claw", a 1957 schlockfest about a giant muppet-esque vulture / condor thing terrorizing the earth. This gem was just released on DVD, and thanks to Netflix, came screeching into my mailbox just in time for Halloween. I watched it last night and it was even worse / better than I remembered. Here's the trailer:
My favorite scene from the film: an army general and some of his staff are listening to the transmission of some air force jets attacking the giant flapping muppet. Naturally, their weapons have no effect on the googly-eyed fiend. The bird begins destroying the aircrafts, and the general disgustedly turns off the radio transmission before it's even over, as if he was too sickened by his favorite football team being blown out to listen any more! It was awesome.
This movie is rightfully famous for having some of the worst special effects ever committed to celluloid. But it much more than just that to offer brave viewers. It also had more stock footage inserted into it than anything this side of an Ed Wood production. Plus, lots of faux-witty / flirty banter between the pilot who plays by his own rules and the beautiful and brave mathematician, and a guy I could swear was Walt Disney playing a researcher specializing in anti-matter. I recommend it without reservation.
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4 comments:
Ok the trailer sucked me in--how did they eventually kill it? The mathmatician babe had something to do with it didn't she?
Nope. She was essentially ballast, as was the style at the time.
It's all rather complicated... basically, they deduce that the reason conventional weaponry
is useless against the giant muppet is that it is surrounded by an anti-matter field, which causes matter to destruct when it touches it (sorta grounded in fact, actually). So the pilot hero, with the help of the Walt Disney-looking guy, constructs a machine that emits a beam of anti-matter (or maybe it emitted a beam of matter..it was late and I'm no physicist) that they lug around in a plane. The creature spots them and gives chase. The men fiddle with screwdrivers trying to get the matter / anti-matter machine to work. The creature closes in. The suspense builds to an unbearable level. I check my watch because I wanted to go to bed. Finally the machine fires, canceling out the creature's anti-matter field, allowing the planes to riddle it with holes and sending it plunging into the Hudson River. The hero / heroine embrace. We see a last shot of the titular giant rubbery claw sticking out of the water, quivering in its death throes as the "The End" titles are super-imposed over.
Now I can sleep tonight. Thanks
I guess I shoulda posted that ending description in "invisotext" or had a "Spoiler!" heading above it so that the ending isn't ruined for the legions of people who no doubt are now interested in renting this gem.
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