THE KILLER SHREWS (1959)

Thorne Sherman (James Best) and his first mate Rook are making a scheduled delivery of goods to the small private island of Dr. Craigis, but a coming hurricane forces the two to anchor the boat near the beach and stay the night, Rook staying with the boat and Thorne on the island. Craigis, who is, with a couple other people, conducting some kind of experiments involving population control, is upset because he wanted to send his daughter Ann back to the mainland with Thorne because of some vague possibility of dangerous animals on the island. As the storm comes in, Thorne can sense tension among the handful of folks sharing the small house, including Bradford, an obsessed, absent-minded researcher, and Ann's surly boyfriend Jerry, a disillusioned assistant who drinks too much. It turns out the group has been doing experiments in genetics, and the upshot is that a bunch of shrews that were lab subjects, have grown to the size of dogs and escaped, and now that they've killed off most of the prey on the island, the giant shrews have been trying to get at the humans during the night. As dusk settles in, Rook is chased up a tree by a pack of the shrews, falls to the ground, and is eaten—the next morning, they find just his skeleton. Soon, the shrews get hungrier and bolder, and begin to dig and gnaw their way into the house. The group also discovers that even getting a surface bite from a shrew is poisonous. How many members of our tense gang will survive to escape by boat once the storm has gone through?

This notorious B-movie actually has a decent premise—though shrews might not have been the best pick for the monsters. When the beasts aren't being actively threatening, Jerry is having a breakdown, threatening everyone, especially Thorne and Ann (who, of course, become an item), and the cheap sets add to the claustrophobic tension of the film. But it's those shrews that gave this movie whatever fame it has. They are actually dogs with some kind of costume on them that looks like a chunk of carpeting. For the most part, they are filmed from a distance or in motion, but they still look more silly than scary. We are told there are some 200 of the creatures on the loose, but we only see a handful at a time. In close-ups, puppet shrew faces with big teeth (see photo) are used, sometimes effectively, sometimes laughably. The actors try but, with the exception of Best as the hero, no one is especially satisfying. Ken Curtis, best known as Festus on Gunsmoke, is completely colorless as the villainous Jerry; Ingrid Goude, a former Miss Sweden, is almost as bland as Ann. It’s hard to hate this movie because it’s so goofy, but it’s just as hard to like it. [DVD]