Hell hath no fury like a 50-foot-tall woman scorned. At least, that’s what 1958’s Attack of the 50 Foot Woman would have us believe.
Allison Hayes plays the titular character. Before her transformation, she was in a bad way. For reasons unclear to me, she still loves her scheming, greedy, adulterous husband (William Hudson). He doesn’t even try to conceal his discretions. Also, while I can’t be the best judge of what most women may be looking for in a man, her passionate love for this jerk must be blind and deaf. I suspect the other three senses must also be deadened. He looks like he would smell bad and feel oily.
Hayes will have a couple of encounters with an alien craft and the giant within. I’m going to guess a weather balloon was used for the ship and I laughed for a long time when my wife and I simultaneously shouted, “ROVER!” Anybody who doesn’t get that reference is proof public schools have failed us all (go watch UK 60’s tv show The Prisoner—now).
Out of the ship emerges a 30-foot giant (according to her later estimate) that reaches for the large diamond around her neck. Mind you, all we see of the giant is a deliriously bad, yet very large, prop hand. We’ll see that hand a lot in this movie, only it won’t have any hair on it later.
We’ll also see a lot more of the ”diamond” around her neck which she claims the giant is reaching for. This comically large stone is obviously just glass. In fact, it looks like it came off a chandelier, which I suspect is its origin. And yet it is allegedly the Star of India.
She will flee the giant unscathed on this occasion, though the story of the encounter will further convince the local populace she’s a nut job. This will give her husband additional fuel to have her committed, another potential route to getting his mitts on her fortune. She had been in a sanitarium once before and that was for headaches. Yep, having headaches was justification enough to put a woman in an asylum back then.
She’s even mocked on the only TV channel that seems to exist in the world of the movie, and the only program at any given time is alleged “news” where the sole newscaster makes snippy, bitchy remarks based on local gossip. That station’s ID is KRKR-TV which, when said aloud, sounds like “Cracker TV”. Hey, I have a new name for “Spike TV”!
I was shocked by the weird lapses in various characters’ logic. When the sheriff tells his deputy about Hayes’s encounter with a flying saucer and a giant, the deputy was only surprised by news of a giant. I guess this must be flying saucer country, where such encounters are taken for granted.
Then there’s the sheriff’s speculation that, if the giant was going for her diamond necklace, it must have been one of those legendary desert tramps. Do they often encounter 30-foot-tall desert tramps? And does the populace frequently wear large diamonds around their necks that attract the inordinately large hobos?
She will not be so fortunate on her second encounter with the giant. We actually get a look at the giant this time, and he looks like a bald Steve Buscemi. Subpar effects work also makes the giant semi-transparent every time we see him. Later, when we see more of the giant, we’ll see he is inexplicably glad in a little bit of leather that looks like a costume for a soldier in the Roman army. No idea what that’s about.
Also, aside from it being the result of bad effects, I would love to have the filmmakers strain to provide an explanation for a car which becomes transparent when the giant picks it up. Never mind the vehicle also changes to a different make and model—one a couple of decades older.
Not sure what in the second encounter did this, but the result is Hayes finally fulfills the destiny in the title. This growth happens while she is in her bedroom. We never see the entire bedroom, but she apparently doesn’t exceed the dimensions of it until she decides to break out through the ceiling. Is this bedroom the size of a small aircraft hangar? Also, why is the debris from the destruction of the house several pieces of freshly milled lumber?
I’m not sure what she is supposed to be wearing when she goes on a rampage around town, but she is pretty modestly glad. Guess whatever principles of physics keeps the Hulk from going completely au natural applies to her, too.
It isn’t much a rampage, either, except for tearing the roof off a bar. She comes to suffer from what I have deemed “Space Giant Malady”, wherein she also becomes transparent when dropped into scenes. The only part of her that directly interacts with people is that same stupid, oversized fake hand from earlier–only now it doesn’t have hair on it.
The destruction of the bar reminds me I forgot to mention Yvette Vickers as Hudson’s action on the side. This is one rough looking character. I believe this is somebody that has been around the block a few times, and it is a big block and it has nothing on it except for liquor stores and smoke shops.
Nothing I have said really conveys how odd it is to watch Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. It is so consistently daffy that I couldn’t help but think some of it has to be tongue-in-cheek. Maybe all of it was—it’s just so difficult to tell what was intentionally funny or not, that I couldn’t determine if it was brilliant or idiotic. I’d say that, regardless of how one interprets it, you will likely have a great time watching this.
Dir: Nathan Juran
Starring Allison Hayes, William Hudson, Yvette Vickers
Watched on Warner Archive blu-ray