[HorrorScience] The Giant Claw (1957)

In the North American cinema of the 50s and 60s you can find a very high number of films that touch on themes related to aliens and giant monsters, to the point that it is a titanic and almost superhuman task to see each and every one of them.

Within that pile of movies, It is inevitable that some stand out and others are forgotten, and in many cases the quality has nothing to do with the fate that awaits the film itself, since to remain in the memory it is enough that the film became famous based on repetitions on television or film sessions of the time, or that it has something that differentiates it from the rest and remains in the viewer's memory, either casually or intentionally.

The Giant Claw It is one of those movies that, however, It continues to be remembered despite the passage of time. For what reason? Now we will see it.

It all starts when an airplane pilot named Mitch MacAfee says he saw a huge shadow flying near him. Because there is no record of it on the radar and that shadow has only been seen by our protagonist, no one takes that alarm too seriously. Until several planes are mysteriously destroyed, once again without the radar detecting that unidentified flying object, something incomprehensible since apparently it's bigger than a battleship.

Once the threat is understood, but without knowing what is destroying the planes or how to stop it, our protagonists find themselves attacked by the gigantic being and end up miraculously saving their lives with an emergency landing.

After the accident, Mitch and his companion Sally are helped by a man who lives near the area of ​​​​the incident. A little later, the local man tells our protagonists that He has seen the gigantic winged being, and he believes it is La Carcanya (a legendary being that has the body of a woman, the head of a wolf and gigantic wings). It will be near the local man's house where the first evidence of the monster will be found: a gigantic bird footprint in the middle of the mountain.

Once back in the city, the situation has not improved. Planes continue to disappear, but now they know who is responsible: a huge bird that flies in circles and whose trajectory is heading towards New York.

This enormous bird seems to be immune to the attacks it receives and does not appear on the radars, with which (and in an extremely extravagant exercise of deduction) our protagonists come to the conclusion that The gigantic bird comes from another planet and has some type of antimatter shield that protects it of attacks and radars.

So, if they want to defeat the huge animal, they must do something that nullifies its antimatter shield, some type of anti-antimatter device, and they must do it quickly, because the animal has decided to create its nest in New York.

More or less this is the summary of the film. It doesn't seem like anything special, but at the beginning of the article I mentioned that there was something that made this film memorable despite the passage of time. And that something is the main monster.

As we know, it is a bird but, reviewing the movie poster, we realize that they do not show us the entire monster. The reason? You can see it in the photos I put below.

Giant Claw is one of the most ridiculous monsters I've ever seen. He looks like some kind of vulture with a Mohawk crest and bulging eyes that give him a ramshackle marionette look. It won't surprise anyone when I say that the film's budget was so small that they decided to save as much as possible on special effects, which is demonstrated by seeing the star of the film.

The ridiculous appearance of the monster is quite curious, because The rest of the film has a very sober and serious tone., with some very acceptable performances, and if not, it would seem that we are facing a parody of monster movies and that everything is done on purpose in order to make us laugh and laugh at the clichés of the genre, but unfortunately that is not the case.

Some curious facts:

• The actors in the film did not know what the monster looked like, which surely helped the seriousness of their performances.
• When Jeff Morrow (the film's protagonist) saw the film for the first time, he left the place where it was being shown when he heard the audience laughing after the monster appeared.
• In order to save money from the low budget, this film has many scenes that come from other films, many of them being from Earth vs. Flying Saucers (Earth VS Flying Saucers) which coincidentally is from the same director as The Giant Claw and that was released a year earlier.