Village of the Giants (

1964

)

Movies intro texts have lied to me more times than I care to count. “Based on a true story”, says The Last House on the Left (1972), “This is real footage we found in the woods, honest,” says The Blair Witch Project (1999), “The documentary scenes totally aren't fabrications” insists The Fourth Kind (2009). But honestly, none of them have been more brazen than today's film which claims that it is based on The Food of the Gods by H.G. Wells. Now, I will confess that I read The Food of the Gods back when I was back in High School, and consequently, my memory of it is a little hazy, but I was pretty sure it was a sober meditation on the promise and peril of technological progress not a teen sex comedy! Indeed, I had previously scratched my head when I saw such titles as How to Succeed with Sex (1970) and Let's Do It! (1982) included in Mr. Big's oeuvre. When did he make the jump from giant monsters to nudie cuties? It seems like the answer is 1964 when Gordon made a movie that was a little bit of both! Village of the Giants sits comfortably at the nexus of Gordon's career, incorporating elements of his earlier career from the 1950s and his later career in the 70s and 80s. This makes it a fantastic biographical artifact, which is good because but this a stupid fucking movie, and I don't think anybody would want to sit through it without a six-pack of beer and/or the MST3K commentary.

The film's credit play out over footage of a bunch of movie teens (read 20 somethings) dancing and gyrating suggestively. I hope you like this sort of thing because that's how the next hour and a half are going to play out. Props to Gordon for at least being straightforward with his audience, I always hate it when a boring film tries to trick me with one kinetic action sequence before the credit roll. Think I'm joking? Well, after the title, we see a car crashed on the side of the road, the passengers of the vehicle pile out and begin to dance and gyrate in the mud to tunes coming from their car stereo. Dammit, Gordon! It's go-go dancing, not heroin; we can last more than five minutes without a fix! There are way too many of these teens to keep track of, indeed I have no idea how all of them managed to fit into the car in the first place (maybe it was a clown car because they are certainly a bunch of clowns). I'm not gonna even try to remember all these names, so I'll just refer to them collectively as the rowdy assholes. Eventually, even the rowdy assholes tire of their mud orgy (I'm sure the audience's patience was exhausted long ago) and they make their way to town.

At this very moment, wouldn't you know that an impossibly bright ten-year-old boy, named Genius (future director Ron Howard in a very early role), apparently his parents were precognitive, has just accidentally created a potion that causes animals to grow to giant size. He only figures out what it does after the family cat steals a bite of it and grows to monstrous size (incidentally, the cat is probably the most famous actor in this movie, having previously starred in The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) and Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)). Genius' sister Nancy and her boyfriend Mike immediately realize the commercial applications for such a chemical, why they could sell to farmers as a food additive and have cows the size of gymnasiums at no extra cost. Goodbye world hunger (well at least if you're not a vegetarian) and hello personal fortune! Too bad Genius only made the formula by accident, so it will take a bit of research on his part to nail down the exact recipe. To make sure it works, Mike gives a bit of the goo to a couple of ducks, which promptly grow to the size of cars. Why you would choose a half-wild, foul-tempered, dinosaur-descendant rapist as a test subject for your giant growth drug is beyond me. Fortunately, this movie is trying to keep a light tone (we're here to gawk at young women in skimpy outfits, not see them killed by giant ducks, a lesson The Horror of Party Beach (1964) could stand to learn) so the ducks just run off and make a b-line for the dance club.

So we're about thirty minutes in and already been subjected to our third dancing scene, this one is especially dumb because halfway through the giant ducks wander into the club and start to go-go dance themselves. As luck would have it, the rowdy assholes were also at the dance club, and the lead rowdy asshole's father is a farm supply mogul. Rowdy asshole prime immediately puts two and two together and realizes that this formula could be worth a fortune. He dispatches one of his girls to seduce the formula out of Mike, while he puts the moves on Nancy. When this falls through (which of course it does because neither Mike nor Nancy nor even Genius at this point knows the formula), the rowdy assholes decide a better bet is to steal the formula for themselves so they break into Genius' basement lab, but accidentally trip the boy's alarm system. The alarm, by the way, is simply brilliant. Rather than a loud buzzer or an automated phone call to the police Genius' alarm sets off a fireworks display! It's exactly the sort of goofy idea that a mechanically inclined kid would have. Unfortunately, even with an advanced warning, Mike and his friends can't stop the rowdy assholes from making off with the sample.

Then things get really, really stupid. Remember how the rowdy assholes were planning to steal the formula as a way of making money, you know what really gets in the way of a plan like that? Using the drug on themselves for no reason beyond some childish pissing contest between Rowdy Asshole Prime and one of his subordinates. I understand that Grodon has a compulsion, and all of his films have to feature gigantic people or giant animals or a combination of the two, but he could at least concoct some reason for the rowdy assholes to accidentally ingest the drug rather than have them spontaneously abandon their quest for riches for no good reason. Immediately the rowdy assholes grow into colossal assholes, bursting out of their clothes in the process (is this film patient zero for the gigantism fetish?). Fortunately, they were holed up in a theater, which is the only place in town with enough fabric to furnish them with a new wardrobe. Having grown to massive size with no real plan about what to do next, the colossal assholes proceed to take over the whole damn town (which is remarkably easy and involves only taking the sheriff's young daughter hostage). From there, it's back to doing what they do best, dancing! This would technically be dance scene #4, but it's just the same footage that played over the opening credits so I'm not sure how to score it.

The adults in town are helpless against the colossal assholes, and apparently, this movie takes place in a town that's about as isolated as River Falls in Earth vs. the Spider (1958), because there's no chance of help from the outside world. So it falls to Mike, Nancy, and the other teens to outwit the colossal assholes and save the town. Their ace-in-the-hole is Genius who is already working on a drug that will reverse the effects of the giant growth formula, only trouble is getting a squadron of 50ft tall giants to take some medicine against their will.

Village of the Giants is a dumb movie, but despite the impossible stupidity of the go-go dancing ducks, the interminable cheesecake excess, and the slip-shod acting (both Nancy and Mike would go n to star in Larry Buchanan movies and boy does it ever show) I can't find it in me to really passionately hate this movie. Part of it is that it's a nudie cutie (though there is no nudity of any sort), a genre which I already have astonishingly small expectations for, that any entertainment I glean from it counts as a victory. Part of it is the goofy special effects which somehow seem to have only gotten worse since Gordon explored similar territory in Attack of the Puppet People (1958). But more than anything it's a matter of commitment to a remarkably bad idea. You see where most filmmakers would shrug and churn out a dull movie, Gordon seems to have done his best to create a true giant monster/beach party hybrid film. The movie jumps from an exciting set-piece to stupid dance number with gleeful abandon. There's a scene where the small teens battle the colossal assholes using drag racers, which exists for no reason other than these movies always seem to have drag races in them. Gordon even throws in a confrontation with a giant spider that has no bearing on the plot, but sure as hell is a lot fun to watch. Maybe no film with such a misguided premise could ever hope to be good, but Village of the Giants comes closer to being an enjoyable movie than it has any right to.