The Giant Claw

The Giant Claw

1957
Fred F. Sears

When I started to seriously collect, and research films, it was the SF of the 50s that initially drove my interest. I responded to the contrast of the straight backed logical scientist hero versus the atomic chaos of something that should not exist. There was certainly a formula for these films established in a large part by The Thing from Another World (1951). The Giant Claw is by-the-numbers 1950s monster movie that highlights the particular strengths and weaknesses of the era.

Mitch MacAfee (Jeff Morrow) witnesses something a big as a battleship during radar test flight. Jets are sent after the object, but one goes missing. The military blames Mitch but more planes start disappearing. The mysterious object is revealed to be a massive bird that can fly at supersonic speeds and loves to eat people. To make matters worse, it’s surrounded by a force field that no weapon can penetrate. Mitch and his mathematician girlfriend, Sally Caldwell (Mara Corday), struggle to find a way to take down the monster’s shield before if kills more people.

Who's a pretty bird?

 The Giant Claw’s biggest problem is right out front. There is no escaping the fact that the titular monster (which has a giant everything, I’m not sure why its claw gets singled out.) is ridiculous looking. It’s in stiff competition with the killer traffic cone of It Conquered the World (1956) for silliest looking monster of the 1950s. If you can forgive this unfortunate looking beast, or even learn to love it, you’ll find one of the more interesting monsters of atomic age. I enjoy how it plays off the flying saucer craze by being mistaken for a one initially. There are some tantalizing ideas that it comes from an antimatter galaxy. It’s also a vicious opponent, gleefully destroying trains filled with people and gulping down pilots who though they were parachuting to safety. There’s also the notion that Mr. Giant Claw is La Carcagne, a giant winged wolf-headed woman from folklore. Very cool, but maybe a bit beyond the pale for a 1950’s monster movie.

Is this La Carcagne?

 Jeff Morrow makes what he can out of Mitch, the stereotypical square jawed 50s scientist. It was notable to see a female mathematician. Mara Corday as Sally, inevitably defers to Mitch by the time the credits roll, but up until that point she puts in the liveliest performance in the film.  Everyone else fades into the mish-mash of generals and scientists that pervade this kind of film.

The Giant Claw has a solid if formulaic story. There are endless scenes of the military fruitlessly trying to destroy the monster while the scientists race against time to develop a way to bypass its impenetrable force field. This sort of story was well established by 1957, and The Giant Claw is competent enough to hit all the necessary plot points without wasting much screen time. There’s nothing ground breaking here, but if you’re in the mood for straight forward atomic monster action, The Giant Claw works, even if the monster evokes more giggles than fear.

Blood Freak

Blood Freak

1972
Brad F. Grinter, Steve Hawkes

Blood Freak is another film, much like Night of the Lepus (also from 1972, maybe something was in the air that year), where the whole concept is so fundamentally flawed you wonder how the creators ever though it was going to work. At the same time, I'm glad they did, the world needs at least one anti-drug Christian propaganda film that features gory mutilation courtesy of murderous turkey-man.

Herschell (Steve Hakwes) is a Vietnam vet who lives an aimless life cruising on his motorcycle. He helps a stranded young girl named, Angel (Heather Hughes) by taking her to her house. Angel's house is filled with no-good hippies smoking weed, and despite Herschell's initial reluctance, Angel coaxes him into trying some. He's pretty much instantly hooked, and soon is offering himself up as a guinea pig to some scientists testing food additives in turkey meat in return for more weed. Seemingly dying from a drugged turkey overdose, Herschell soon rises from the grave. Now with a monstrous turkey head, he lives only to drink the blood of hippies.

From the synopsis, you might make the mistake of thinking this is some tongue-in-cheek Troma-esque horror comedy. Let me allay those fears, this is a completely serious film that is trying to turn you off of drugs and onto religion with the help of a little sleaze and blood.There is some attempt to evoke the unnerving qualities of a bad LSD trip, or the cinematic equivalent at least. However, It would take a surrealist of David Lynch caliber to make a monster turkey headed man actually terrifying. 

I haven't mentioned the secret MVP of Blood Freak, and that is the increasingly unhinged narrator. What begins as a man droning on endlessly about nothing in particular, slowly over the course of the film, becomes a chain smoking fevered mess of a human being. It's here the movie tries to drive home its message about temptation and keeping to a righteous path, and it's here it appeals to the idea that a murderous were-turkey can pray for forgiveness and receive it… as long he can stop smoking that darn pot and hanging out with counter-culture weirdies.

Of course, this message gets muddled up with some discussion about the mistreatment of soldiers back from Vietnam, and the misuse of industrial chemicals on food and recreational drugs. If your pro-Christian message film is taking the time for a lengthy scene of someone getting their leg cut off on a circular saw table, an unclear message is perhaps the least of your problems.

Blood Freak is a glorious slice of truly insane film making. It is unabashedly weird, but never self-consciously so. It's technical, and storytelling flaws are many, but it comes together into something that is far greater than the sum of its parts. Blood Freak is a bizarre misguided mishmash of monster/religion/drug films and it's wonderfully wrong on every conceivable level. It's a Psychotronic masterpiece that cannot be missed by anyone interested in cult film.

ThanksKilling / ThanksKilling 3

ThanksKilling/ThanksKilling 3

2009/2012
Jordan Downey

               

I really don’t care for movies that fall under the ‘deliberately bad’ category.  Rather than poking fun at some of the clichés and failings of horror and science-fiction, it’s often just an excuse for lazy film making.  There are a few notable exceptions, films that use a bargain-basement aesthetic and loopy scriptwriting to produce something sublime.

The plot for ThanksKilling is relatively simple; Natives put a curse on the Pilgrims by summoning a demonic turkey that will rise every 500 years to wreak havoc. In the modern day, a group of partying college kids discover they are being stalked by said demonic turkey and must consult the gathered knowledge of turkiologists in hopes of finding a way to stop him.

The original ThanksKilling is a holiday themed slasher-parody complete with nudity, one liners and a memorable villain: Turkie, the villainous turkey puppet hungry for vengeance. Despite its micro-budget, it’s acted well enough, the special effects, although on the cheap side, have a rough charm to them. Turkie is a fun antagonist and most surprisingly of all, it’s actually funny. This alone puts it ahead of 99% of horror spoofs. It runs a brief seventy minutes, which is probably exactly the right amount of time to keep things fresh and moving along at an engaging pace.

To think the seeds of what was created by ThanksKilling could result in ThanksKilling 3 is mind boggling.

ThanksKilling 3 tells the story of the fate of ThanksKilling 2, a movie reportedly so terrible every copy has been destroyed, save for one which falls into the felt hands of Yomi (voiced by Jordan Downey), a Jim Henson–style puppet who is currently in search of her mind which fled her some time ago. Yomi meets up with Uncle Donny (Daniel Usaj) a TV spokesman for the Pluckmaster 3000 and would-be creator of a Thanksgiving themepark. He also has a brother Jefferson (Joe Hartzler), and a rapping grandma named Flowis. Turkie along with his son, Nibla (voiced by Preston Altree) target Yomi and her friends in hopes of getting the last copy of ThanksKilling 2 and using it to unleash devastation on the world. Their journey takes them to Featherwold and Turkey Hell. Along the way we also meet Turkie’s ThanksKilling 2 co-star Rhonda Worm (voiced by Kevin Stewart) and his bio-mechanoid MUFF (Jordan Downey).

ThanksKilling 3 is a leap of light-years in terms of just about everything. The script is ambitious, the puppets and effects are imaginative, and the whole project just feels bigger and better. It’s consistently funny and inventive. Interestingly there moments of absolute beauty, many of which I can’t help but feel were inspired by Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010), because it certainly taps into that same hallucinatory 1980’s VHS aesthetic.

With the shear variety of rubber monsters, blood, and mayhem, the whole thing feels a little a bit like a GWAR movie with a dubstep score. So proceed with your tolerance for those things in mind.

It runs twice the length as the original ‘ThanksKilling’ and I feel that’s just a little bit too long, there are a few scenes of the heroes standing around staring at the solution to their problem and not doing anything that could have been trimmed down, but I also feel some of the long running time is to also to accommodate the numerous ideas they had for the film and that’s never a mark against a movie.

ThanksKilling is good but ThanksKilling 3 is remarkable, and both are fine way to spend Turkey Day.