THE GIANT CLAW

d. Fred F. Sears (1957)

The Giant Claw is surprisingly considered for a film about a massive killer bird from outer space which looks like a cross between a new born vulture and Rod Hull's Emu. The enormous (and enormously goofy looking) winged monster is, in fact, from a galaxy many millions of light years away, a galaxy made of anti-matter. As such, the Giant Claw (for the record, it has several giant claws) is impervious to our weapons and so flaps around the world quite freely, destroying planes and trains and cars as if they were simply slightly shabby scale models, knocking the tops off buildings and chomping down pedestrians and parachutists like screaming fleshy tic tacs.  

It takes a lot of collateral damage and a great deal of convoluted sort of science chat before the forces of humanity are able to blast the creature out of the skies for good, although, before hand, and to their great satisfaction, they do manage to find its nest and scramble its huge solitary egg with a couple of sniper rifles.

This film went by so quickly it almost felt like a dream, just not as realistic. It works very well on its own terms and the super-sized death turkey with its mohican hair-do (or is it a wind blown comb across?) and tombstone teeth is a once seen, never forgotten creation.

THE NIGHT THE WORLD EXPLODED

d. Fred F. Sears

A dedicated scientist invents a machine that can forecast earthquakes just in time to predict that the world is about to be destroyed by a series of uncontrollable explosions. The cause is Element 112, a previously unknown type of rock that (rather like the stuff in Monolith Monsters, but in reverse) increases its mass when it dries out, then explodes with enormous force. Nobody is quite sure why this is happening, or where all the stock footage came from, although a pretty young scientific intern has a theory: ‘it’s like the Earth is paying us back for stealing its natural resources’*.

An early-ish example of an eco-disaster film, The Night The World Exploded is cheap but charming, if slightly confusing (the disasters take place during the day for a start). Despite being just over an hour long, however, and being about exploding rocks and volcanoes and the end of the world, it does drag a little bit, not least in the scenes where we watch people descending rope ladders into the Carlsbad Caverns for about ten minutes.

* Later on, the chief scientist comes up with a theory: 'it's like the Earth is paying us back for stealing its natural resources'.

TEEN-AGE CRIME WAVE

d. Fred F. Sears (1955)

According to the prologue of this film, teenage delinquency is ‘a plague’. I don’t disagree with that but I always think of delinquency as being no worse than some petty crime and vandalism, maybe some minor violence, somewhere between high spirits and childish frustration at the adult world. I'm clearly very naïve as here the teens start off with armed robbery before very quickly moving on to several murders, including the shooting of a police man.

The protagonists are Mike Denton and Terry Marsh, a teenage Bonnie and Clyde with a penchant for guns and heavy petting in public. Mike is about five foot four, has a scar on his face and a chip on his shoulder. He’s the sort of person for whom it’s not enough to have a gun, he has to keep pushing it in people’s faces. You can’t want for the tough guy act to slip and for him to start snivelling and bawling.

His girlfriend Terry wears a satin blouse and talks out of the side of her mouth in a clipped hardboiled tone, like Mae West and Jimmy Cagney's lovechild. She has no intention of being taken alive, which is just as well, as she won't be. A victim of sorts, she’s had a tough upbringing (think Cinderella but without any of the magic stuff, especially not a handsome prince) and cries and moans in her sleep.

Most of the film is taken up with a siege at a mid-west farmhouse. It all gets pretty intense, so it’s a relief when the duo and their hostages break out and take to the road. The climax takes place at the Griffith Observatory, more famously used at the end of Rebel Without A Cause*. There’s a real humdinger of a fist fight in one of the rotating telescope domes, and Terry gets her wish, evading capture by being shot in the back and killed. The beaten and bloodied Mike, under arrest, breaks down and cries like a big old baby, or rather like the little kid he actually is - and well he might, as his next stop will be the gas chamber.

* The James Dean film came out barely a month before Teenage Crime Wave, so it may have even been a coincidence. But I doubt it.

THE WEREWOLF

d. Fred F. Sears (1956)

Cheaply but carefully made, The Werewolf provides a surprisingly contemporary retelling of the hoary old lycanthropic legend, placing the action in Smalltown USA and making it a condition of mad modern science rather than arcane folklore.

The origins of the werewolf are somewhat odd, with responsibility falling to a couple of fascist scientists who plan to outlive the impending nuclear apocalypse by combining human genes with the survival traits of other successful species. When a timid salesman injured in a car crash falls unexpectedly into their clutches they ruthlessly inject him with a syringe full of lupine essence and sit back ready to note down the results.

Their victim escapes, of course, and trudges through the snow to the small ski resort town of Mountaincrest. Here, the poor, frightened fellow transforms into a ravenous, drooling wolf: a hairy, hungry killing machine. The townspeople, dressed almost exclusively in plaid, form a posse to track him down.

The werewolf spends most of his time running, but never really gets anywhere, not least because there’s nowhere to go. In his old life he was a nice man with a wife and a son but now he is a crazed killer, a beast who inadvertently seals his fate by ripping apart the scientists who made him like this in the first place. With literally no turning back, he ends up full of yokel bullets, a bloodied heap of hair. His dying act is to revert to his human form, a pitiful and questioning look upon his face. 

It’s rather a depressing spectacle, but then werewolf films never have happy endings, they just don’t work that way.