Some films leave you shaken to the core of your being, leaving you forever changed, your life irreparably altered.  This is one of those films.  And not in a good way.

     It's hard to say where this one went wrong.  Certainly when they farmed the special effects out to a company in Mexico, things took a wrong turn, but had they lost their way long before?

     Our lead, Jeff Morrow (Exeter in This Island Earth) plays Mitch MacAfee, our doughy-faced hero, an Air Force pilot and radar specialist who radios back an airborne encounter with an unidentifiable object as 'big as a battleship.'  When he lands, however, he finds that nothing was detected on radar.  Then another plane goes missing, with a report of a UFO.

     Of course, eventually the authorities come around and they discover that they're up against (drumroll....) a giant bird from outer space.

     I'll let that sink in.

     Said bird is radioactive (pause), immense (pause), and blessed with an antimatter shield that protects it and makes it invisible to radar (long pause).  It is protecting its egg (pregnant pause) and has been destroying planes in the air. 

     Things escalate to the point of the bird pecking chunks out of the top of the top of the United Nations' building...

     This film is infamous for its bargain basement special effects and the absolutely ridiculous puppet they made for the monster.  It looks like a child's plush toy, only absurdly hideous.  A bad marionette puppet adorned in turkey feathers, it is shocking to see on screen--it looks so overwhelmingly laughable that it completely destroys the work of the competent, if uninspired, acting, directing, and photography. It looks significantly like Rod Hull's Emu.

     The script is as guilty as the special effects in undermining the film.  Bad dialogue, bad pacing, and completely half-baked from start to finish --besides the monumentally bad idea of a killer space bird (with antimatter shields!), it features my all time favorite line of bad movie dialogue:

     "Close, General, close, only not electronic spitballs... ATOMIC spitballs!"

     Morris Ankrum (Lt. Gen. Edward Considine) always played a general or a doctor in this kind of movie, including Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers.   Robert Shayne (General Van Buskirk) is best known as Inspector Henderson on the 1950s The Adventures of Superman TV show. Both Ankrum and Shayne appeared in Kronos as military men, and both also appeared in How to Make a Monster.

     Some music and footage is reused from Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers, and some clips are from Thirty Seconds over Tokyo.  All in all, a tremendous amount of The Giant Claw is footage lifted from other sources--if only there had been a giant chicken movie they could have used instead of that ridiculous pullet puppet!

½ rocketships (out of five)

PLUSES: It's in focus.