Island Claws (

1980

) ½

To stay fresh, the Eco-Horror/Mother Nature’s Revenge genres of films needed a steady string of novel animals to mutate into remorseless killing machines. Naturally the more innocuous and harmless animal, the better a candidate it was for a bath in radioactive waste. Between Frogs (1972), Night of the Lepus (1972) and Squirm (1976) it seemed like there was a private competition between filmmakers to find the most harmless animal imaginable that could be featured as the monster in a horror movie. It wasn’t long before the genre was plumbing the depths of the most absurd examples of the 1950s monster movie craze. Indeed, today’s film borrows its central concept from Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957) and gives us a gigantic mutated crab, though it drops the hive mind idea probably because that was just a bit too weird. In real life, crabs are harmless (and delicious) creatures that are ugly but in a way that is not threatening and indeed somewhat endearing. All they can do is scuttle about sideways at a glacial pace when on land, and their sole offensive ability is a pair of clumsy pincers. Any pretense of a crab being a genuine threat vanishes completely once you see how the awkwardly the little creatures swim.

Right at the start, Island Claws makes the mistake of thinking it can get us invested in its human characters. How is it monster movies made nearly a half-century after King Kong (1933) fail to grasp the simple truth about their audiences: We don’t give a shit about the human characters, we’re here for the monsters first and foremost. King Kong got to be the star of his movie and it worked perfectly; why subsequent monster films (excluding of course, the kaiju sub-sub-genre) never seemed to grasp this is beyond me. Consequently, we’re treated to a rather tedious story about a young reporter, Jan Raines, writing a story about a scientific research station investigating the possibility of growing giant crabs as a food source. Jesus, even the fictional article sounds boring. There will be plenty of time for the scientists to explain their methodology al la Gog (1954) although without the whizz-bang demonstrations that the older movie employed. Naturally, no time waster would be complete without an unnecessary romantic sub-plot so Jan begins going out with a handsome young crab-researcher named Peter.

News reports tell us that shortly before the movie began, there was an accident at the local nuclear power plant that belched-up several thousand gallons of radioactive water into the nearby sea. By a curious quirk of fate, Jan’s dad is the head of the plant’s safety and in typical 1980s scumbag businessman fashion is intent on covering up the whole incident. By an even more curious quirk of fate, he’s also the one responsible for the death of Peter’s parents many years before. He was drunk at a party and offered them a ride home, only to accidentally pull a Ted Kennedy and crash his car into the bay. Not much is going to come of this sub-plot, or the subplot about Haitian refugees who have turned up on the island, or even the draw-out subplot about Peter’s relationship with his hard-drinking Irish adoptive father. But hey, that’s the nature of filler, we can’t just jump right to the good part.

The film gets its greatest absurdity out of the way early on: Just how are we supposed to accept that a pack of slow-moving crabs poses a threat to anyone. When the crabs pour into the trailer of the local drunk/musician, a man named Amos, his reaction is one of pure horror instead of the more understandable one of anger or more probably annoyance. Seriously, these crabs pose no threat to the old man, who would have probably lasted until the end of the movie if he hadn’t panicked and burned down his house like an idiot. The crabs don’t get any more threatening in the next scene when they waylay Jan on her bicycle in the woods. Jan later tells Peter, and by extension the audience, that the crabs attacked her, but all they seem to do is crawl along the path she was biking on. It’s not like it would take a Hong Kong Cat III style scene of wonton animal cruelty to get the point across to the viewer that the crabs were a threat. Seriously, just show us Jan knocked to the ground with crabs crawling over her, maybe a few quick shots of crab puppets jumping up at the camera. It wouldn’t have cost much, or put any real crabs in danger, and it certainly would have been more effective than this. As it stands now, the first part of the movie makes it seem more like the disaster at the nuclear power plant somehow triggered a wave of mass hysteria resulting in rampant Kabourophobia.

Things improve dramatically once the film starts to bust out the giant killer crab menace. Up until I saw this thing, I was certain that the Island Claws was a low-budget fly-by-night operation, but it obvious that the film just sunk its entire budget into this massive puppet. Whereas the monster movie filmmakers of the 1950s and 60s had to content themselves with stop-motion animation, or process-shots, or even the occasional forced-perspective trick, Island Claw decided to make its monster life-sized. This means that the human actors can actually interact with the puppet directly rather than through some lame camera trickery. Obviously, seeing a man impaled with a giant crabs’ pincer is more impressive than watching the normal camera tricks monster movie filmmakers use to disguise the diminutive size of their monsters. What’s more, the crab-puppet is a nifty piece of craftsmanship in-and-of-itself. Obviously Glen Robinson, the special-effects maestro behind King Kong (1976) and Logan’s Run (1976), knew what he was doing. This thing blows the crude puppets in Corman’s Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957) out of the water. Alas, Island Claws suffers from a serious case of “tell don’t show”, and refuses to let us see this magnificent prop until the film’s conclusion. One can only imagine what would have been the case had this production been in the hands of a seasoned monster movie director like Bill Rebane or Bert I. Gordon instead of one-time director/producer/writer Hernan Cardenas.