The Giant Claw starts as electrical engineer Mitch MacAfee (Jeff Morrow) working for the US Government is piloting a Military jet plane for reasons which escape me, while flying along Mitch notices 'something' up there with him which he describes as a UFO but no-one down below monitoring him on radar see anything & thus don't believe him. However when reports start coming in regarding planes mysteriously going missing amidst reports of UFO's the people in charge change their minds about Mitch. Soon the Giant Claw has revealed itself, a huge bird like creature from outer space with an anti matter shield that likes to eat people & destroy buildings. Earth's weapons are useless against it, can a lowly electrical engineer & his lady friend mathematician Sally (Mary Corday) find a way to destroy the Giant Claw before it destroys us?
Originally worked on under the title The Mark of the Claw this black and white 50's monster flick was directed by Fred F. Sears for Columbia shortly after he had directed Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) for them & I would have thought that Columbia was looking for another hit sci-fi film. Instead Columbia got one of the silliest sci-fi monster films ever made, according to the IMDb director Sears actually died of a heart attack in late 1957 just five months after The Giant Claw had been released in theatres. The script by Paul Gangelin & Samuel Newman is obsessed with the word battleship & takes all the usual monster film clichés & cobbles them together like the first twenty minutes where some unseen monster is going around causing lots of damage, someone seeing it yet no-one believing him, the romance between the hero & the token female character, the expected scenes of crowds of people running & screaming, the military people who want to destroy it, the scientists who come up with loads of pseudo scientific nonsense that in reality doesn't mean a thing or make any sense, the awkward sounding narrator who is used to quickly announce various bits of exposition, the very stiff & frankly absurd script & dialogue, cardboard cutout character's, the copious amounts of stock footage & a short sub eighty minute duration. It's all here & it's rarely as fun as in The Giant Claw, basically if your the kind of person who takes watching films very seriously then you will hate The Giant Claw but if you can just go with it & enjoy a film, no matter how bad it is, for what it is then the chances are you will get some guilty pleasure from The Giant Claw. I mean how can anyone not like a film about a giant turkey from outer space destroying the Earth? Definitely a so bad it's great sort of film.
Director Sears can't really be blamed for how bad the notorious effects are, the producers were apparently going to have the monster created using stop motion animation but couldn't afford it so they gave the contract to a place in Mexico to cut costs &, quite frankly, the Giant Claw looks as silly as any giant monster from any film you care to name. Having said that it's eyes move, it's nostrils flare, it's mouth opens & closes & it's wings flap (well usually) so at least it's got some sort of movement even if it's not entirely convincing. There are a few continuity errors as well, the planes often change make between shots with the sequence where the planes first attack the Giant Claw & it grabs one in it's mouth which as a model is completely different to what it originally looked it when it was stock footage being particularly noticeable. Some of the destruction scenes set in New York are taken from Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. Apparently when released theatre audiences laughed at The Giant Claw back in 1957, star Jeff Morrow has said he never saw the bird until the premiere since all the special effects scenes were shot separately & when he did see it he sneaked out of the cinema to avoid any embarrassment after it had finished. You can't blame him I suppose...
Technically the film is basic, the special effects are really poor & the script is full of laugh out hilarious lines but it's fun & I loved every silly moment of it. The acting is as wooden as a tree, no-one comes out looking particularly good.
The Giant Claw is a fun 1957 monster film, whether you like it as much as I did will entirely depend on how much tolerance you have for awful looking monsters, rubbish special effects, an unintentionally hilarious script & dialogue & of course it's shot in black and white which will put some off all by itself. Me, I thought it was great & it's as simple & straight forward as that.
Originally worked on under the title The Mark of the Claw this black and white 50's monster flick was directed by Fred F. Sears for Columbia shortly after he had directed Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) for them & I would have thought that Columbia was looking for another hit sci-fi film. Instead Columbia got one of the silliest sci-fi monster films ever made, according to the IMDb director Sears actually died of a heart attack in late 1957 just five months after The Giant Claw had been released in theatres. The script by Paul Gangelin & Samuel Newman is obsessed with the word battleship & takes all the usual monster film clichés & cobbles them together like the first twenty minutes where some unseen monster is going around causing lots of damage, someone seeing it yet no-one believing him, the romance between the hero & the token female character, the expected scenes of crowds of people running & screaming, the military people who want to destroy it, the scientists who come up with loads of pseudo scientific nonsense that in reality doesn't mean a thing or make any sense, the awkward sounding narrator who is used to quickly announce various bits of exposition, the very stiff & frankly absurd script & dialogue, cardboard cutout character's, the copious amounts of stock footage & a short sub eighty minute duration. It's all here & it's rarely as fun as in The Giant Claw, basically if your the kind of person who takes watching films very seriously then you will hate The Giant Claw but if you can just go with it & enjoy a film, no matter how bad it is, for what it is then the chances are you will get some guilty pleasure from The Giant Claw. I mean how can anyone not like a film about a giant turkey from outer space destroying the Earth? Definitely a so bad it's great sort of film.
Director Sears can't really be blamed for how bad the notorious effects are, the producers were apparently going to have the monster created using stop motion animation but couldn't afford it so they gave the contract to a place in Mexico to cut costs &, quite frankly, the Giant Claw looks as silly as any giant monster from any film you care to name. Having said that it's eyes move, it's nostrils flare, it's mouth opens & closes & it's wings flap (well usually) so at least it's got some sort of movement even if it's not entirely convincing. There are a few continuity errors as well, the planes often change make between shots with the sequence where the planes first attack the Giant Claw & it grabs one in it's mouth which as a model is completely different to what it originally looked it when it was stock footage being particularly noticeable. Some of the destruction scenes set in New York are taken from Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. Apparently when released theatre audiences laughed at The Giant Claw back in 1957, star Jeff Morrow has said he never saw the bird until the premiere since all the special effects scenes were shot separately & when he did see it he sneaked out of the cinema to avoid any embarrassment after it had finished. You can't blame him I suppose...
Technically the film is basic, the special effects are really poor & the script is full of laugh out hilarious lines but it's fun & I loved every silly moment of it. The acting is as wooden as a tree, no-one comes out looking particularly good.
The Giant Claw is a fun 1957 monster film, whether you like it as much as I did will entirely depend on how much tolerance you have for awful looking monsters, rubbish special effects, an unintentionally hilarious script & dialogue & of course it's shot in black and white which will put some off all by itself. Me, I thought it was great & it's as simple & straight forward as that.