The Giant Claw

I was going to put this review of The Giant Claw in my next book, provisionally titled Stabford Deathrage Drags You Screaming To Hell, But Hell Turns Out To Be The Checkout Lane At Walgreens At 2 A.M., When All You Want To Do Is Buy A Stouffer's Macaroni And Cheese And The Joker Ahead Of You Has Like A Million Tiny Items And You Grow Old And Die There From Boredom, but that might be too long to fit on a book jacket and I've decided to put it here instead, even though the movie is awful enough to warrant getting paid for watching it.

An inexplicable giant bird attacks aircraft, trains, and French Canadians in this dreadful sci-fi film. As a voiceover narrator narrates, there's stock footage of road graters and various military operations. A pilot who's not a pilot suddenly sees a blurry bird-shaped UFO, and then aircraft seems to start to disappear, while the cast struggles to put those two events together. Then a miniature plane crash lands, and the strings supporting it are only barely visible. There's an explosion, and burning airplane wreckage is thrown by someone offscreen at the air crash survivors. Then there's stock thunder and lightning effects.

During a storm, a French Canadian man cries, and says that he saw a carcagne, which is a giant woman with the head of a wolf and bat wings that often portends death, and if he's describing the Giant Claw he's doing a piss-poor job of it. Suddenly, a poorly rendered puppet of a giant goofy bird appears, which then eats parachuters with its oddly anachronistic toothy beak in LOL-inducing extreme close-up. Someone says that it's a 'fantastic orgy of destruction', and I'm not sure they know what the words 'fantastic orgy' mean.

The bird builds a nest, and once it's stopped moving you can kind of see that it looks like a puppet of a mangled, raggedy feather duster if a puppet of a mangled, raggedy feather duster looked like Jimmy Durante and if Jimmy Durante had a lolling, gangly neck like an ostrich and a few sparse mohawk-y feathers on his head. Then someone shoots its egg with a rifle, and that just seems to make it mad, as it decides to eat the escaping French Canadian. The Giant Claw keeps making a sound that sounds like a giant caw, and it only becomes irritating after the first 15 million times it does it.

Some hot rodding hooligans say the word 'daddio', then they're eaten by the Durante Duster, and not a moment too soon. Then it awkwardly destroys parts of New York, I think. The Giant Claw seems months longer than its 75 minute runtime, but it's highly recommended if you like stuff that sucks.