1950s SF film

The Giant Claw, 1957, USA   DIRECTED BY FRED F. SEARS
UFO sightings become real when "a bird as big as a battleship" terrorises the skies over North America. At face value The Giant Claw is a pretty average ’50s B-movie with acres of stock Air Force footage and standard performances from the cast that never take you far beneath the skins of the characters. But... then there's the main draw, the extraterrestrial bird itself, a laughably bad marionette that can only ever inspire pity for the cast. The director Fred F. Sears, who only the previous year had directed the minor classic Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers, never let the cast know what this "feathered nightmare on wings" would finally look like, and maybe that was just as well otherwise his film would never have made it to completion. He ended up contracting a low-budget model maker in Mexico City to make the bird instead of the original idea to use stop-motion animation from Ray Harryhausen, which would certainly have cost plenty more but would also have given the movie a certain caché as he'd recently created the creatures for 20 Million Miles to Earth and It Came from Beneath the Sea. And you have to feel sorry for the film's star Jeff Morrow: The Giant Claw premièred in his home town and so embarrassed was he by the audience's laughter every time the bird appeared that he left the cinema early, hoping no one would recognise him. It was a box-office turkey, although it's viewed today with genuine affection because you know precisely what you're in for: good mindless entertainment, especially at those frequent moments when it mistakenly tries (and happily fails) to take itself seriously.

1950s SF film

Day the World Ended, 1955, USA   DIRECTED BY ROGER CORMAN
After a nuclear strike on San Francisco, in a nearby country house an ex-Navy man and his eligible daughter are descended upon by an assortment of refugees from the destroyed city, while the nearby forests are discovered to harbour a mutant creature out for blood. Roger Corman's first foray into science fiction was devoid of much science beyond the usual post-apocalyptic preoccupations of survival, mutations and monsters. His cast of oddball characters and their idiosyncrasies rub up against each other constantly, resulting in a few rather decent performances despite the movie's occasionally ponderous pace. When revealed the monster itself is disappointing, but on the plus side there are also many indications of a more colourful and adventurous imagination at work, one that had an easy facility for blending horror and SF in that entertainingly low-budget style that Corman made his own. This is by no means a great Corman SF movie, but it was a decent enough beginning.