Yeah, it’s an April Fool’s joke. I’ve been looking forward to posting this one.

For those who are wondering what the heck they just watched, let me tell you. In 1957, veteran B-Movie producer Sam Katzman picked up yet-another-cheap, by-the-numbers sci-fi monster script, this one dealing with a giant alien bird terrorizing the world titled The Giant Claw. He signed on a solid cast of genre veterans – Jeff Morrow (best known as Exeter in This Island Earth), Mara Corday, Morris Ankrum, and Robert Shayne – and had ideas that he’d hire Ray Harryhausen to do the effects.

Only, it turns out that Harryhausen’s brand of stop motion costs quite a good deal of money, even with his cost-saving innovations. So, he hunted around and eventually hired the special effects duties out to a Mexican company to save money (he also cribbed some stock-footage of Harryhausen’s Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, resulting in several Washington landmarks inexplicably appearing in New York City for the climax).

They came back with…what you see above; a puppet that looks like they dug it out of Jim Hensen’s dumpster (what you don’t see above is that it’s accompanied throughout by an equally goofy “Rawk-rawk!” sound effect). And so died any chance the film had of either being taken seriously or of ever being forgotten.

So, the cast gamely went through the motions of the two-week shoot, having no idea what was in store for them (the only hiccup, so far as I know, being a jaw-dropping moment where a crewman simulating an off-screen exploding plane threw flaming wreckage about an inch from the actors’ heads, resulting in Morrow, Corday, and the actor playing the supposedly-dead pilot jumping up in alarm before a very abrupt cut). They were picturing something like a streamlined-eagle and were promised first-rate special effects.

Jeff Morrow describes what happened next:

“But the first time we actually got to see it was the night of the premiere. The audience couldn’t stop laughing. We were up there on screen looking like idiots, treating this silly buzzard like it was the scariest thing in the world. We felt cheated, that’s for sure, but they told us afterward that they just ran out of money. They couldn’t afford anything but this stupid puppet. But it was just terrible. I was never so embarrassed in my whole life.”

Poor Mr. Morrow lived in a small town, and always went to see his film in the theater with his family and then to meet-and-greet his neighbors afterwards. When this one came on, he slipped out early and went home to start drinking.

Gotta feel bad for him and the others, but the result is an unintentional comedy classic: one of the great bad films of that era.

(Another rather funny bit of trivia: the plane that shoots down the bird at the end via Morrow’s sci-fi technobabble is piloted by Morris Ankrum’s three-star general and Robert Shayne’s two-star general, making it the highest-ranked two-man flight crew in film history).

It took quite a while to find a good song for this one, since the whole joke required something not only awesome and powerful, but also one that would fit the subject. Also, it couldn’t be too long, since there’s actually not a lot of footage to work with: I’d say about half the Claw’s screen time is repeated footage (and there’s quite a bit of that in the video above, as you might notice: all I can say is they’re all taken from different points of the film).

After trawling about for quite a while and sourcing suggestions from friends (tricky, because I didn’t want to reveal what exactly I was working on), I finally found Disturb’s Unstoppable. And since the buzzard is portrayed as functionally invincible owing to an anti-matter shield (don’t ask), that fit, while the pacing of the song was about right. I chopped out most of the middle of the song to get it down to a usable length (it’s about four minutes uncut), but overall I’m very satisfied with my choice.