All right, it’s October and that means it is time for some monster movie retrospectives! And this movie is a doozy.

The Giant Claw is an American monster movie released in 1957 as a double feature with The Night the World Exploded (got to love old movie titles). It is most remembered for the bizarre (re: terrible) design of its titular monster and the insistence of the characters to alternatively refer to the monster as being “as big as a battleship” or being a “flying battleship”.

The plot of the movie sees a civic aeronautical engineer named Mitch MacAfee (played by Jeff Morrow), who while performing a radar test flight near the North Pole, sees an unidentified flying object he describes as being “as big as a battleship.” This “flying battleship” destroys an aircraft sent to investigate, leaving military officials angry at MacAfee over the loss of the plane and pilot.

MacAfee and mathematician Sally Caldwell (played by Mara Corday) fly back to New York where the plane gets attacked causing a crash landing in the Adirondack Mountains. They stay with a French-Canadian farmer who sees the monster offscreen and describes it as “La Carcagne”, a creature with the head of a wolf, the body of a woman, and wings (in other words, nothing like what we see in the movie).

MacAfee deduces the monster’s pattern of attack appears to be in a spiral, granted, how he deduces this when the map of attacks appears to be in a straight line is anyone’s guess.

After about 25 minutes into the film, we finally see the monster….and it is one of the goofiest things ever put to screen. The movie reportedly was originally going to have stop motion legend Ray Harryhausen providing the creature effects, but were unable to hire him due to budget constraints and therefore had to use a low-budget special effects company out of Mexico City, Mexico.

Apparently the cast also had no idea what the monster was supposed to look like, as such, everyone in the film plays this entire situation straight (which also makes it unintentionally more hilarious). Jeff Morrow has also said that he left early during a screening of the film in his hometown after the audience kept laughing at the monster in the hopes of not being recognized afterward.

As the monster continues its rampage, the military realize that nothing they throw at it works. Scientist determine that the bird came here from space, specifically, an antimatter galaxy and has some sort of invisible antimatter force field to protect itself (I mean, there’s 50s monster movie science and then there is this movie).

Needless to say the reception to this film was overwhelmingly negative. While the movie surrounding the monster effects is alright for the decade, you usually go to a monster movie for the monster so naturally when the biggest selling point looks a muppet crossed with a taxidermy turkey…you can understand why people were disappointed.

The film would become the subject of late night TV marathons and filler for things such as TNT’s MonsterVision.

The Giant Claw, like many similar films, become more well known through the advent of the internet as an odd artifact of 50s monster movies.

If you want to check this one out, it was released on a Blu-Ray with several other movies last year, and can be watched on Tubi.

Next week, we cover a movie that will leave you howling.