THE GIANT CLAW / Columbia - 1957 / Music by Mischa Bakaleinikoff

Tonight we have some classic 'schlock.' When the big-wigs at Columbia saw the final cut, they basically had a big heart attack!! Part of the movie had been farmed out to a Mexican company for creation of the space vulture and the filming of it's parts including the models. Columbia execs were expecting something closer to FORBIDDEN PLANET! Instead, what they got was a pretty damn good Mexican monster flick!

Seriously, you can't get a title card better than that!! The awesome Mischa Bakaleinikoff is our music conductor for this title. Mischa has 148 composing and... get this!.. 402 credits from the music department! WOW!!.. Now, give a listen to tonight's classic offering... Big Bird and Small Talk!!

SOUNDCLIP NOT AVAILABLE

There are 7 uncredited composers that contributed to this project including Max Steiner and Marlin Skiles!

Jeff Morrow plays Mitch MacAfee, the pilot who first saw the bird. He says "Its as big as a battleship!" even though it didn't show up on radar! Then, we also have the beautiful Mara Corday playing Sally Caldwell. Both actors have already been featured here at The Dungeon! The second still shows Mitch's weird theory about a spiral pattern the bird is flying, because that the placement of the X'es correspond to where the thing had been sighted!.. Looks like a straight line to me! Did they have LSD in 1957?!

Here's Mitch and Sally as they mix love with space monsters at his bachelor pad!

Nice series of stills, and, it happens to more than just this guy!

Get real, how in the hell's that thing gonna help??

I love these posed shots as people at the beach watch the space bird pass overhead!

A good 'n' ugly shot of the thing as it... err... she works on a nest!

Great stuff here as the teens race along the highway, they have a salt shaker so they can put salt on the tail of the big bad bird if it comes around!.. What a setup!!

I'd bet that these three shots show the reason for some of the angst the producers felt as they sat there watching this turkey! Top pic shows the hot rod on a string before a firecracker blows it up! The second still shows the bird flying away holding a string of train cars!!! Those would be hot dogs in any cartoon!

Mitch finally gets his infernal 'anti-matter' demolisher working, so, they mount it in the rear end of a WW II bomber! Get this, the Generals take over the piloting job! Those were real men back then! And, no wonder, that's Robert Shayne and Morris Ankrum there!