#paul gangelin

[thewarmestplacetohide]

Dread by the Decade: The Scarlet Claw

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★★½

Plot: Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson must solve a small town murder that locals believe was committed by a monster.

Review: While certainly entertaining, this film devolves as a Holmes story due to its predictability and increasingly ludicrous final act.

Source Material: The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle Year: 1944 Genre: Psychological Horror, Mystery Country: United States Language: English Runtime: 1 hour 14 minutes

Director: Roy William Neill Writer: Paul Gangelin Cinematographer: George Robinson Editor: Paul Landres Composer: Paul Sawtell Cast: Basil Rathbone, Nigel Bruce, Gerald Hamer, Paul Cavanagh, Arthur Hohl

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Story: 2.5/5 - Lacks the cleverness one expects from a Holmes mystery and becomes far too silly to build tension.

Performances: 3/5 - Rathbone is great as Holmes, but Bruce is too oafish and comedic for Watson. Some of the supporting cast is quite bad.

Cinematography: 3/5 - A few striking, shadowy shots, but mostly by-the-numbers.

Editing: 2.5/5 - A bit choppy.

Music: 2.5/5 - Derivative of better mystery scores.

Choreography & Stunts: 4/5

Effects & Props: 3/5 - The swamp fog and glowing monster look fairly decent.

Sets: 3.5/5

Costumes, Hair, & Make-Up: 3.5/5 - Holmes' trademark hat is absent, but it's all serviceable.

Trigger Warnings:

Mild violence

Domestic abuse

[moviesandmania]

THE GIANT CLAW (1957) Reviews and free to watch online in b/w or colour

‘Flying beast out of prehistoric skies!’ The Giant Claw is a 1957 American science fiction monster film directed by Fred F. Sears (The Werewolf) from a screenplay written by Samuel Newman and Paul Gangelin. The Sam Katzman produced movie stars Jeff Morrow and Mara Corday. It was released by Columbia Pictures. The Giant Claw is usually mocked for the quality of its special effects. The bird is…

[mariocki]

The Giant Claw (1957)

"Now, if this thing of mine works, and we can get close - real close - and bombard that bird's antimatter energy shield with a stream of mesic atoms, I think we can destroy that shield. The bird would be defenseless then except for beak, claws, and wings. You could hit it with everything but the kitchen sink."

"We've got kitchen sinks to spare, son."

[manualstogo]

For just $3.99 They Drive by Night Released in December, 1938: A demented killer is strangling dance hall girls, and a hapless ex-con is accused and chased by the police. Directed by: Arthur B. Woods Written by: James Curtis, Paul Gangelin and Derek N. Twist. The Actors: Emlyn Williams Shorty Matthews, Ernest Thesiger Walter Hoover, Anna Konstam Molly O'Neill, Allan Jeayes Wally Mason, Anthony Holles Murray, Ronald Shiner Charlie, Yolande Terrell Marge, Julie Barrie Pauline, Kitty de Legh Mrs. Mason, William Hartnell bus conductor, Iris Vandeleur flower lady, Joe Cunningham Detective Pryor, William John Davies young boy, Edgar Driver customer at Charlies, Jennie Hartley unknown, Brenda Harvey unknown, Mike Johnson old convict being released, Vi Kaley flower seller, George Merritt Detective, Bernard Miles Detective at billiard hall, Frederick Piper bartender, Charles Rolfe card player at billiards hall, Leonard Sharp card player at billiards hall, George Street second detective at billiards hall, Harry Terry convict being released, Jack Vyvian Jack McKenzie, Leslie Weston Jack. Runtime: 1h 35m *** This item will be supplied on a quality disc and will be sent in a sleeve that is designed for posting CD's DVDs *** This item will be sent by 1st class post for quick delivery. Should you not receive your item within 12 working days of making payment, please contact us as it is unusual for any item to take this long to be delivered. Note: All my products are either my own work, licensed to me directly or supplied to me under a GPL/GNU License. No Trademarks, copyrights or rules have been violated by this item This product complies withs rules on compilations, international media and downloadable media. All items are supplied on CD or DVD.

[mst3kproject]

The Giant Claw

This is exactly the kind of movie that makes MSTies think fondly of our favourite show.  It’s got Jeff Morrow from This Island Earth, Mara Corday from The Black Scorpion, Morris Ankrum from Rocketship XM, Robert Shayne from The Indestructible Man, a Portentious 50's Narrator who likes to ramble, and a monster you won't believe even after you've seen it.  I was hoping it would be picked up for Season 11... maybe it'll make Season 12.  I can just hear the guys singing the title along to the opening music sting, or whining but I made sandwiches! on behalf of the female lead.

Some object as big as a battleship is buzzing around North America, destroying airplanes wherever it goes!  First it's a search plane over the Arctic, then a transport on its way to New York, then a plane full of men who attempt to parachute to safety, but don't quite make it. Whatever it is it can be glimpsed as it passes, but doesn't show up on radar.  Talk of flying saucers abounds, but eventually engineer Mitch MacAfee and mathematician Sally Caldwell discover the horrible truth: it's a giant anti-matter bird from another galaxy! Even worse, it has come to Earth to nest – we must destroy it before its eggs can hatch, but how do we do that when its antimatter shield annihilates any bullets, rockets, or missiles we can fire at it?

You will find quite a few reviews of this movie online and nearly all of them will focus on the same thing: the monster.  And I will admit up front, The Giant Claw's monster deserves every word of incredulous derision that has ever been heaped on it.  It is ridiculous.  Imagine The Muppet Show doing a sketch involving a none-too-bright vulture.  Picture what the vulture puppet would look like.  That is the monster from The Giant Claw. Godzilla would have laughed at it.  It has bulging eyes and a tuft of hair on the top of its head.  It has a ridge down its back like a dragon and I think its call is just somebody yelling “squaaawwwwk!” into a microphone.  It has teeth. Its feathers look like the whole puppet was shipped across the country in a box full of newspaper and nobody bothered to straighten up its plumage.

In short, it looks like this:

Where was that bad boy in your Gargantuan Panoply, eh, Jonah?

You may have heard the story about how the company originally contracted to do the effects just pocketed the money and ran off, leaving the production company to buy themselves a bird from a shady company in Mexico for whatever they could scrounge from their couch cushions.  You may have heard that the actors had no idea what the monster looked like until they saw the movie for themselves at the premiere, whereupon they snuck out of the theatre and went to go drink the humiliation away.  I have no idea if any of these things are true, but they're such well-trodden ground that I don't feel like going over them again.  Instead I will talk about the non-monster parts – because frankly, those are pretty hilarious, too.

For starters, there's another thing a lot of reviews talk about: the narrator.  Like The Beast of Yucca Flats or The Atomic Brain, The Giant Claw has an intermittent narrator who doesn't always make a whole lot of sense.  In fact, the opening scene, in which Mitch becomes the first to sight the bird during a test flight, only to be accused of playing a practical joke when it doesn't show up on any radar, is entirely narrated.  This is very odd, since this is the part of the movie where we ought to be meeting the characters and establishing the conflict.  You would expect it to be the part where it's most important to show us things rather than telling us – telling can happen later when we have some frame of reference for what we've been told.

I can't imagine any halfway-capable writer doing this intentionally, and the writers of The Giant Claw (Paul Gangelin and Samuel Newman) do seem to have been at least halfway-capable.  They both had fairly long careers, Newman writing for television and Gangelin penning, among other things, one of the Rathbone/Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies.  The dialogue in The Giant Claw is awful, including such fantastical down points as 'follow the pattern', the mesonic atom, and 'get me my pants, will you, General?', but the story is linear enough and follows the standard monster-movie beats: first sighting, rising action, supersitious yokel connects the creature with some local legend, the military is useless, all-out destruction, and finally the world is saved by technobabble bullshit.  It's never great (in fact it's barely mediocre), but it's functional – except for that truly abysmal beginning.  I can only imagine that something must have happened, like they ran out of time or money and simply could not shoot the opening of the movie properly.

The narrator also has a favourite word, which quickly becomes the whole movie's favourite word: battleship. I think The Giant Claw uses the word battleship more than the actual movie Battleship. Whenever the narrator wants to tell us that the bird is big, he calls it as big as a battleship. Mitch MacAfee describes it as big as a battleship. Sally and the skeptical military brass derisively call it his flying battleship. The word is used so many times, it actually starts to do that thing where it stops meaning anything and becomes a mere noise.  Az bigazza baddle shipp.

When the movie tries to talk about science, what comes out of the characters' mouths is very nearly complete gobbledegook, with a few physics words thrown in to try to sound plausible.  It rarely even reaches a Star Trek level of scientific accuracy, except in one notable case, where it is very much better than Star Trek. Remember the episode The Alternative Factor, in which a guy is travelling between matter and anti-matter universes?  Spock does explain that when matter and anti-matter meet, they annihilate each other, but the writers totally failed to understand how this works.  They seemed to think that a person must meet his or her own duplicate in order to annihilate, whereas in the real universe any proton can annihilate with any anti-proton, any electron with any positron.  This is how it works in The Giant Claw, as the bird's antimatter force field destroys all the matter it encounters.

The movie also throws a couple of surprising bones to the idea of the bird as an alien. Talking about the feather he's examined, staff scientist Dr. Noymann notes that he calls it a feather because it looks like one and appears to be functionally analagous, but this is not strictly accurate, any more than it would be accurate to call a pterosaur’s pycnofibres 'hair' just because they serve the same insulating purpose.  There is also a scene in which Sally and Mitch discuss whether the bird eats, and conclude that it somehow draws energy from the vehicles it destroys, but not through internal digestion.  When so many films assume that extraterrestrial life will both look and function like Earth life, it's nice to see even a bad movie note that we can't take this for granted.

Although there are exceptions, like Reptilicus or Starcrash, I've generally found that the best bad movies are those that really are earnestly trying to say something even if they don't succeed.  A lot of reviewers seem to think The Giant Claw is a fairly empty movie as well as a hilariously terrible one, but I'm not so sure that's the case.  Rather than just being about a giant buzzard and some extremely crummy models, this is a movie about science, about seeking a rational explanation, about eliminating the impossible to settle on the merely improbable, and about how when things don't make sense it probably means you're on the verge of an important discovery.

When the bird is first sighted, people try to write it off as a practical joke on Mitch's part, because who ever heard of a bird az bigazza baddle shipp that doesn't show up on radar?  Even when it's clear something weird is going on, people complain it doesn't make sense: Sally lists possible alternate causes for the airplane accidents that keep happening but dismisses them all, and one of the military men grouses that MacAfee might as well tell him that 'black is white and two plus two equals six'.  The characters make progress not by dismissing the events, or by blaming paranormal phenomena like flying saucers, but by studying the evidence.  The photos from Sally's weather balloons and the shed feather tell Dr. Noymann that it is a bird, that it comes from space, and that it uses anti-matter for defense.

Never mind that these conclusions are way sillier than flying saucers and that the 'science' that supports them is bullshit.  The point is that you need to have the facts before you can move from them to how to deal with the situation.  Once they know what the bird is and what it's made of, things like the ineffectiveness of traditional weapons and the radar invisibility make sense (at least in the world of the movie) and Mitch and Sally can use their knowledge of physics and mathematics to come up with a plan that works.

In the real world, a lot of scientific progress happens when things don't seem to make sense.  Einstein couldn't reconcile the speed of light predicted by Maxwell's equations with the structure of space as predicted by Newton, and out of this seeming contradiction came relativity.  Nowadays science has a similar problem with the incompatibility of relativity and quantum mechanics, but scientists know from experience that this means there's a better theory out there that we just haven't found yet.  When the world doesn't seem to make sense, it's actually just telling you to dig a little deeper, because the next layer down will blow your mind.

Not bad for a movie about a giant anti-matter bird from another galaxy.

[nicolae]

SetThings - The Racketeer

https://www.setthings.com/en/the-racketeer/

The Racketeer

Directed by Howard Higgin Produced by Ralph Block Written by Paul Gangelin (story and screenplay) A.A. Kline (dialogue) Starring Hedda Hopper Carole Lombard Cinematography David Abel Edited by Jack Ogilvie Doane Harrison Distributed by Pathé Exchange Release date November 9, 1929 Running...

[moviesandmania]

The Giant Claw - USA, 1957

‘Flying beast out of prehistoric skies!’

The Giant Claw is a 1957 American science fiction monster feature film directed by Fred F. Sears (The Werewolf) from a screenplay by Samuel Newman and Paul Gangelin. The Sam Katzman produced movie stars Jeff Morrow and Mara Corday. It was released by Columbia Pictures.

The Giant Claw is usually mocked for the quality of its special effects. The bird,…

[moviesandmania]

THE GIANT CLAW (1957) Reviews and free to watch online

THE GIANT CLAW (1957) Reviews and free to watch online

‘Flying beast out of prehistoric skies!’ The Giant Claw is a 1957 American science fiction monster film directed by Fred F. Sears (The Werewolf) from a screenplay written by Samuel Newman and Paul Gangelin. The Sam Katzman produced movie stars Jeff Morrow and Mara Corday. It was released by Columbia Pictures. The Giant Claw is usually mocked for the quality of its special effects. The bird is…

[moviesandmania]

The Giant Claw - USA, 1957 - reviews

The Giant Claw – USA, 1957 – reviews

‘Flying beast out of prehistoric skies!’

The Giant Claw is a 1957 American science fiction monster feature film directed by Fred F. Sears (The Werewolf) from a screenplay by Samuel Newman and Paul Gangelin. The Sam Katzman produced movie stars Jeff Morrow and Mara Corday. It was released by Columbia Pictures.

The Giant Claw is usually mocked for the quality of its special effects. The bird is…

[moviesandmania]

The Mad Ghoul (1943)

The Mad Ghoul (1943)

‘A new sensation in horror!’

The Mad Ghoul is a 1943 American science fiction horror film directed by James P. Hogan (his last film, before he died of a heart attack, aged 53) from a screenplay by Paul Gangelin and Brenda Weisberg.

The Universal production stars Turhan Bey, Evelyn Ankers (Hold That Ghost; The Frozen Ghost), David Bruce, George Zucco, Robert Armstrong and Milburn Stone.

Plot:

Dr.…