From my favorite movies..

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

For having a relatively low budget, the film's style and overall art direction are immensely impressive.

There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

The Giant Claw – a huge, superfast bird thingamabob terrorizing the earth. They can't kill it with military weapons. But maybe there is hope, because Mitch (Jeff Morrow) and Sally (Mara Corday) work on a way to defeat the bird with the help of (dramatic drum roll) science!"Yet another monster flick", you might think – and you'd be perfectly right. Why should you watch this one? Because of the Giant Claw itself. It is a truly wondrous creature: a hideous puppet with a wrinkled face, off-standing hair and enormous pop eyes. As a movie monster, it's as ludicrous as it gets. Surprisingly enough, the movie itself is pretty okay. Director Fred Sears doesn't make as many catastrophic blunders as you'd expect. This isn't an Ed Wood movie, after all. It's just that the contrast between the fairly serious story and the silly bird is as pungent as it's funny. As a trash movie, it might be a bit underwhelming. Still, you haven't lived until you saw the amazingly ugly Giant Claw.

While the producers were trying to come up with a plot (which they barely did), one could think they would try to put some quality into this film. As it turns out, it's a big rubbery bird, hanging on a string, terrorizing the populace. It is just a dumb monster movie,only the monster is downright laughable. It squawks, it yelps, it bounces in the air. The sad thing is that some real movies that could have been made probably didn't. It also has some actors who have been in reasonable films wasting their time in this thing. Oh well, if you just want to make fun of something, have a look. Maybe after a few beers. It's a mess.

As far as totally inept monster movies go, this has to be one of the best - or, indeed, worst, depending on your taste. Packed with wooden actors, actresses who have little to do apart from scream, and more false science than you can shake a stick at, THE GIANT CLAW will go down in history as one of the best "bad" movies ever made. And it's all down to one thing - the monster itself.To get an idea of how rubbish the monster in this film is, you have to realise that even audiences IN THE '50S laughed it off screen when it appeared. It's supposed to be a giant bird, complete with nasty-looking teeth (?), but in fact it's a gigantic, stiff-moving PUPPET, held up with obvious strings. The bird has a ridiculously rubbery long neck which bobbles about all over the place and makes laughable squawks when it tries to be threatening. Beady eyes roll back and forth in the creature's eye sockets as it jerks through the sky and some wise guy also gave it a tuft of hair to make it look even more stupid.When the big bird isn't going after plastic model aeroplanes in the sky, it's wrecking cities, achieved with copious usage of stock footage. Think that music sounds familiar? It is. Luckily for us, slick hero Jeff Morrow is on the case and thankfully thinks up a solution to destroy the indestructible menace - bombard the creature with atomic rays which will destroy its anti-matter force field and thus allow the army to shoot it from the sky! Pretty Mara Corday is the female assistant who doesn't really do much but it gives the sleazy Morrow somebody to romance. Also popping up are some stuffy military generals (like you couldn't have guessed), some obnoxious teenagers who taunt our hero with cries of "daddy-o!" (!) and even a comedy Frenchman.Thankfully, clocking in at 72 minutes, it's only a short film, any longer and I don't think I'd have been able to cope. Want to see a giant turkey - far worse than any of those Japanese rubber creations - destroy a few model cars/trains/planes? Want to see a boring climax which is all build-up and about two minutes of action? Want to see something just so BAD that somehow it becomes good, in a way? Then see THE GIANT CLAW!

Did the scrawny-looking bird puppet used in this movie inspire Jim Henson to create "Big Bird"? One might be excused for thinking so. Apparently the producers were going to employ stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen to create the special effects, but then decided to go with something requiring less time and money. The result elicited nothing but laughter from audiences, even in 1957. I understand that the actors never actually saw the ludicrous- looking "monster" until after the movie was completed, which undoubtedly explains how they all managed to get through the production with straight faces. That's probably just as well, since playing this sort material absolutely seriously is the only way it can possibly work. They love to make fun of films such as this on shows like "Mystery Science Theater 3000". However, films such as this really don't need that treatment because they're already so "bad" that they require no external enhancement to be appreciated for what they are. As legendary low-budget film maker Roger Corman once observed, "You cannot set out to make a 'cult movie', only the audience can make a 'cult movie'".