An ode to The Giant Claw
I inherited a lot of things from my dad. A love of baseball. Country music fandom. Crippling depression (It’s jokes, folks, but it’s also not jokes).
Also, his movie collection.
That’s a really stupid way to list it, because dad’s “movie collection” was two VHS tapes: The Blob and The Giant Claw. And after I accidentally recorded over The Blob at some point in my childhood (what the hell, Blob makers? No little tab? Ya jerks), it became just The Giant Claw.
Odds are excellent that you’ve never heard of The Giant Claw. It was a 75-minute sci-fi movie from 1957 whose biggest stars (Jeff Morrow and Mara Corday) are names I might have made up, you don’t know. Its basic plot was that an engineer discovers a UFO and no one believes its anything real until it turns out to be a giant other-galaxy bird, “as big as a battleship,” that has a force field that makes it bulletproof and likes to destroy things, eventually taking down New York City. Mr. Engineer guy figures out “a special kind of isotope” that can shoot down the bird’s antimatter force field and leave it vulnerable to missiles.
It was … not good.
But for a big chunk of my life (probably until I discovered movies as a form of activity), I don’t think there was any movie I saw more than this one. And as such, it deserves a few words in its honor.
You saw, in the trailer above, the titular bird and its titular claw. It’s obviously some awful effects work. Even for 1957, that was pretty pitiful. It was in fact famously so bad that Morrow, the star, didn’t see the bird until he went to a screening in his hometown, and reportedly sneaked out of the theater early amid laughter, went home and started drinking.
The ultimate solution, a tail-mounted ray gun that shoots “a special type of isotope” at the bird to destroy its antimatter force field, is depicted in the movie by a cylinder on the back of a model plane with a pew pew sound effect, intercut with the screeching bird existing. You see nothing fire from the ray gun, you see nothing happen to the bird. It’s just “Hey, this cylinder makes the bird killable, EXCITING!”
And then there’s Pierre. See, the first real experience we get of the bird is about a third of the way into the movie, when main characters Mitch and Sally crash-land a plane in the Adirondacks (their pilot was killed when he lightly bumped his head in an interaction with the bird) and come across French Canadian Pierre (played by actual Canadian Lou Merrill! Not French, but hey, that was close). Pierre is the closest thing the movie has to intentional comic relief (the bird puppet was more than enough comic relief, but accidental). He takes in Mitch and Sally and, to help calm their nerves, gives them some of his homemade booze. At Mitch’s appreciation of the taste, he says “Hunh hunh, you like Pierre’s apple jack!”
Why do I give you that very specific vignette? Because I first saw The Giant Claw far enough ago that I don’t even remember it, and despite the fact that I now haven’t seen it in at least 25 years, I think of that sentence at least once a week. Any time someone reacts strongly to the burn of a strong drink, or any time someone eats Apple Jacks cereal, it occurs to me to drop that line in conversation, because it is an absolutely wonderful callback to an absolutely hysterical line … except that literally no one would get it except me.
You should watch The Giant Claw some time. It’s actually available in its entirety on YouTube. There is always something to be said for the movies that are true films, that are high art. But there is just as much to be said for the movies that are little more than Mystery Science Theater 3000 wannabes. Bad movies deserve love too. And The Giant Claw was and is a truly bad movie. Just awful. And that’s why I love it so.