The Giant Claw (1957) / - The Night The World Exploded (1957) - Newspaper Ad

San Francisco Examiner - September 19, 1957

Here is an embarrassing admission I will enjoy sharing with the world. The first time I ever watched The Giant Claw, when it aired on some random Saturday afternoon, it scared the living daylights out of me.

Yes, really. That oh-so-laughable snaggletoothed giant bird, to my five or six-year-old self, looked like some surreal horror ripped from a nightmare. The idea that the sky could hold and hide an inescapable gigantic grotesquerie like that terrified me. The spectacle of that weird bird knocking down toy planes and swallowing people attempting to parachute to safety horrified me.

Oh, and do not get me started on when they found its nest and shot the beast's egg!

Nowadays I understand and appreciate The Giant Claw for daring to attempt a straight-faced monster movie with the most cartoonish and goofy looking creature that ever disgraced motion pictures.

This scared me!?!

I have yet to see The Night The World Exploded, which was the second half of this double-feature. In Twice the Thrills! Twice the Chills! Horror and Science Fiction Double Features, 1955 - 1974, Bryan Senn dismisses The Night The World Exploded as a failure suffering from a "dearth of characterization, over-reliance on stock footage, impoverished special effects, and lazy scripting." [P. 59] Ouch.

Both films were directed by b-movie stalwart Fred F. Sears, who also helmed the previous year's superior double-header Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) and The Werewolf (1956). Those two are worth seeking out.