Sunday, February 21, 2010

Day 328: The Giant Claw (1957) - Rank 3.5/5

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From the dark recesses of my childhood, one wrought with many a Saturday afternoon spent watching cheesy horror films, comes "The Giant Claw." It's hard to believe that as a kid, this movie creeped the shit out of me. Why? It's was that damned bird marionette. That puppet looks like how the devil might have appeared to Jim Henson had he a Hunter S. Thompson lifestyle. I still recollect the lazy summer evenings where I would suspiciously eye the dusk sky, waiting for that damned bird to swoop down and eat me, emitting it's vicious laugh (the sound of the bird's cry actually sounds like the orgasm of a harp seal reversed with a lot of reverb). To look at the thing now and imagine that it was once terrifying sounds laughable.
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But other creatures that haunted my dreams from my childhood, like G'Mork from "The Neverending Story"
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Lord Kuruku from "Unico on the Island of Magic"
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and not included is the sketch drawing John Lithgow does of bigfoot in "Harry and the Hendersons."

The film is as insipid as the monster itself, but it's so laughably absurd, it's actually fun. The bird flies in a predictable spiral pattern, branching ever outward from the point where it entered our world. Where did it come from? The scientists explain that during an atomic test during a top secret radar experiment a dimensional door was opened to an antimatter universe and this bird, from 17,000 B.C. on the parallel Earth came forward in time to our world. Simple enough. I talk about that shit happening in my science class all the time. Pretty common really. Where do you think "The Bozo Show's" Wizzo the Wizard came from? (speaking of terrifying characters from my childhood...)
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Watch the Trailer
...or just this.

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