THE GIANT CLAW (1957)

Up at the top of the world, Air Force scientist and pilot Jeff Morrow sees a UFO, but because nothing shows up on radar, he is accused of pulling a prank until a commercial airline pilot also reports a sighting. One old Canadian trapper thinks he's seen it and believes it's a flying wolf-woman out of folklore, but eventually, it's revealed that the strange flying object which has begun attacking planes is a gigantic extraterrestrial bird, protected by an anti-matter barrier that prevents it from showing up on radar. Morrow and his squeeze (Mara Corday) theorize, based on the spiral pattern of its flights, that it's building a nest somewhere, and sure enough, it is. They find a giant egg and destroy it, but somehow the huge bird winds up in New York City, perched Kong-like on a skyscraper, where they buzz the thing in planes and manage to attack it with some invention of Morrow's that does indeed polish it off. From the summary, you might assume this is no worse than any other 50's kiddie-matinee monster flick, but you'd be wrong: what drags it down (or takes it soaring to the heights of bad-moviedom) is the monster bird, a terribly cheap special effect puppet. In my notes, I wrote, "Muppet vulture with visible strings." It just never looks very frightening, and it takes too much suspension of disbelief to think that it is. Morrow and Corday are veterans of such films and are OK, but they can't really make the movie worth watching. [DVD]