Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958)

For the most part, I found about old horror, sci-fi, and monster movies through sources like the classic Crestwood House monster books, movie trailer compilations like Fantastic Dinosaurs of the Movies, or documentaries like The History of Sci-Fi and Horror or AMC's Monster Mania series, but that wasn't the case with Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. The first time I ever heard that title was actually on an episode of Johnny Bravo, of all things, specifically Jumbo Johnny, where Johnny overdoes it on a protein shake that causes him to grow to a gargantuan size. While walking through the city, he comes upon two guys looking at a poster for this movie and commenting on how ridiculous the concept of giant people is. When they see him coming towards them, one of them exclaims, "Holy cow, we're eating crow!", and the other adds, "And the taste is bitter indeed," before Johnny unintentionally squashes them. Because the movie's title sounded so generic, like something you'd expect them to think of just as a quick gag for a kid's cartoon, I thought that's all it was, and it wasn't until I bought that Monster Madness book when I was eleven that I learned, "No, this is a real thing." I never saw the actual movie until many, many years later, specifically in my late 20's, when I bought the Camp Cult Classics Vol. 1 DVD set at McKay's, where it came with The Giant Behemoth (which I wanted on DVD, as I'd only had it on VHS up to that point) and Queen of Outer Space. Obviously by then, I was very well aware of how it was considered a prime example of bad 50's sci-fi and monster flicks, and yet, it's had such a place in popular culture in the decades since it's release that I figured there had to be something genuinely special about it. Well, my first viewing of it was not an enjoyable one, as I found it to be rather boring, slow (despite being only 65 minutes long), and not even fun on a bad movie level, and re-watching it a second time, my opinion hasn't changed much. The story can be divided into three sections: the main character coming off as pathetic and hopelessly attached to her dog of a husband, her growing to giant size and the doctors trying to figure out what to do about it, all while the sheriff and the others search for clues about the close encounter she had beforehand, and her finally rampaging through the town, and not only are none of these acts entertaining but, worst of all, when you finally get what you paid for in the climax, it's lackluster, to say the least, both in terms of special effects and pacing. It's not bad enough to where I would mark this as an entry of Movies That Suck, but it's definitely not a good movie, either.

A UFO is spotted all over the world and happens to be heading straight for California, where Nancy Archer has a close encounter with both it and its occupant out in the desert, one that sends her running back to town in hysterics. The reason why she drove off into the desert in the first place was because she caught her husband, Harry, flirting with Honey, the local skank, the latest in a long line of massive hurdles in their troubled marriage, one which ended once before but has recently been rekindled. While Harry, who's only interested in Nancy's fortune and estate of $50 million, plots with Honey to get her out of the way so they can have the money all to themselves, Nancy tells the local sheriff and his deputy what she saw. Because of her troubled history, which includes alcohol problems and some time spent in an institution, the authorities aren't inclined to believe her, and when the sheriff and his deputy drive out to the spot, they find nothing but the car she abandoned. When Nancy later tells Harry of her encounter, he sees this as a sign that she's losing her mind again and plans to use it as a means of having her institutionalized again. Nancy, however, is determined to prove she's not insane and the next day, she has Harry drive out into the desert with her to look for the UFO and the giant alien she says she saw, agreeing to be committed if they don't find anything. At first, it seems as if that's the way things will play out, but as night falls, Nancy spots the UFO and excitedly jumps out of the car and runs up to it. There, both she and Harry encounter the alien, who becomes intrigued by the Star of India, the priceless diamond Nancy wears around her neck, and abducts her, while Harry drives off in a panic. He attempts to skip town with Honey but is detained by the police, and the next morning, Nancy is found atop her pool house. Her family physician, Dr. Cushing, is forced to sedate her, and becomes concerned about scratches around her neck, as well as apparent exposure to some kind of radiation. The actual effects of her close encounter are soon revealed when Nancy starts growing to a gigantic size, and if they're unable to keep her sedated, both Harry and Honey will have nowhere to hide.

Nathan Juran, who started out as an Oscar-winning art director, was definitely a hit and miss director, especially with his science fiction and monster movies. On the good side, he did beloved classics like 20 Million Miles to Earth and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, both notable for the stop-motion work of Ray Harryhausen, as well as respectable movies like The Deadly Mantis (I actually really like that movie but that's mostly because I have a strong childhood connection to it), but he also made truly awful movies such as this and The Brain from Planet Arous, both of which he admitted he took purely for a paycheck and was so embarrassed by that he used the pseudonym of "Nathan Hertz." Fortunately for him, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad was the movie he went on to make immediately following Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, and he also did other memorable movies, like the Western, Good Day for a Hanging, and Jack the Giant Killer, a fantasy adventure in the style of the Sinbad movies and with stop-motion effects akin to those of Harryhausen, as well as episodes of shows like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space, and The Time Tunnel, before his retirement from filmmaking in the early 70's.

The apt word to describe Nancy Archer (Allison Hayes) is pathetic, and that's putting it mildly. The poor woman is an absolute wreck: she's had problems with alcoholism, has spent some time in an institution, and is married to a man who's an absolute cad, only interested in her fortune and has a constant wandering eye. In fact, she's already separated from Harry once and yet, she's back with him, despite knowing what an awful man he is. Even though she caught him flirting with another woman at a bar prior to the film's opening and admits she knows he's after her money, she, in a very sad, drunken confession, says she can't help but love him. Between that, the encounter she has with the alien spaceship (which she and everyone else refers to as a "satellite" due to the then recent debacle over Sputnik) and its occupant, and the belief around town that she was either drunk or imagined the incident, her life is completely unraveling. She also makes the mistake of telling Harry what she saw, hoping for some sympathy, but all she gives him is a way to have her recommitted to the institution so he and her lover, Honey, can inherit her money. By the morning after her close encounter, Nancy has sobered up and, very likely thanks to her faithful butler, Jess, knows that Harry spent the night with Honey at the hotel. When she sees a news anchor making fun of her story on TV, that tears it for her and she decides to go into the desert and search for the spacecraft, taking Harry with her. She even goes as far as to promise to have herself recommitted if they don't find anything and, after a lot of searching and not finding anything, she begins to truly doubt her own sanity. Of course, they do eventually find the spacecraft, but poor Nancy is grabbed by the large alien, while Harry runs off to save his own skin. The next day, Nancy is found lying atop her pool house and has to be sedated by her doctor. She then starts growing to an enormous size and the doctors can do nothing but keep her under sedation and restrained by large chains. Eventually, Nancy awakens, breaks out of the house, and heads to town with only one thing on her mind: finding Harry. She manages to find him and, after killing Honey, grabs Harry and tries to walk off with him, but the sheriff is able to kill her by blowing up an electrical transformer, and she and Harry die together.

Harry Archer (William Hudson) is a totally unsympathetic asshole who's already cheated on Nancy once before and yet, is back with her purely for her wealth while continuing to cheat on her, this time with a slutty woman named Honey. Fed up with Nancy, Harry is given the idea by Honey to push her back over the edge into insanity and have her recommitted in order to gain control of her $50 million fortune. He plays the part of the dutiful husband when they meet up back at their home, and when Nancy tells him of the encounter she had, he believes she may already be on the verge of losing it and tells Honey they won't have long to wait. The next day, they make a bargain where Nancy promises to go back to the institution if they don't find any sign of the spacecraft or the giant alien out in the desert. When they do, indeed, come across it just as they're about to head back home as evening falls, Harry does try to stop Nancy from running up the hill towards it, and also fires at the alien, but abandons her when his bullets do nothing to stop the alien. He drives back to the house, packs up all his clothes, gets into a fight with Jess when he demands to know where Nancy is, and tries to skip town with Honey, but Jess calls the sheriff, who keeps him from doing so. After Nancy is found, Harry and Honey are brought over to the house, where the two of them lie and say they were together the night before in order to discredit Jess' story about him going with Nancy out into the desert with a loaded gun. However, fearful of what Nancy may say when she comes to, Harry, under Honey's advisement, decides to sneak into her bedroom and give her a fatal dose of her sedative. When he does, he makes the shocking discovery that she's growing into a giant. Following that, he overhears one of the doctors say he believes she can helped with surgery but they need his permission in order to perform it and so, he hides out in town with Honey, waiting for whatever the end result of Nancy's condition will be. Unfortunately for the both of them, the end result is a jealous and angry giant who tracks them down, kills Honey, and grabs and walks off with Harry, only for the both of them to die soon afterward.

In many ways, Honey (Yvette Vickers) is even worse of a person than Harry, as she's the one who eggs him on and comes up with various ways of getting rid of Nancy. She brings up the notion of doing her in right from the beginning, which initially shocks Harry, and then comes up with the alternative of pushing her over into insanity again so she'll be recommitted. Moreover, following Nancy's reappearance and sedation, Honey tells Harry to give her an overdose of her sedative in order to kill her, having overheard Dr. Cushing tell the nurse exactly how much she's to be given. And finally, she tells Harry to hide out with her so they can't find him in order to get his consent for Nancy to undergo the surgery that may help her. Needless to say, Honey is just as immoral as she is slutty, wanting the whole ordeal to be done and over with so she can stop having to stay at the hotel, and dreams about what she and Harry will do with Nancy's fortune. That dream is eventually shattered when the gigantic Nancy starts running amok and kills her when she crushes her after she takes underneath a table at the bar. On a side note, I have to say that, all while viewing this movie, I couldn't stop thinking about the gruesome circumstances of Yvette Vickers' actual death, with her body being found a year after she died in her home, as I remember reading that news on IMDB when the story broke in 2011. (In fact, Allison Hayes had a pretty nasty end too, as she contract lead poisoning from calcium tablets and eventually developed leukemia.)

One truly decent character is Jess (Ken Terrell), Nancy's loyal butler, who despises Harry and what he does to her, and the feeling is clearly mutual. He does what he can to help his anguished employer, including very possibly trailing Harry and learning he spent the night with Honey, and when Harry shows up at the house without her after he took her into the desert, Jess demands to know what he did with her, leading to a fight between them. Following that, Jess calls the sheriff on Harry, who detains him, but he and Honey come up with a fake alibi to try to bring Jess' story into doubt, though Dr. Cushing knows Jess is a trustworthy fellow. Later, Sheriff Dubbitt and his deputy, Charlie, find giant footprints leading to the pool house, the first evidence for them that Nancy's claims about a huge alien aren't that farfetched (yeah, somehow, they were still skeptical, even with Nancy growing into a giant), and Jess follows them out into the desert with Dubbitt. Together, they find the spaceship, as well as the alien, but despite this, they're unable to prevent Nancy's fate after she awakens as a giant.

Speaking of Sheriff Dubbitt (George Douglas) and Deputy Charlie (Frank Chase), they're, for the most part, typical ineffectual authority figures. In fact, Charlie, besides being the expected bumbling, comic relief deputy, isn't even an honest cop, as he accepts a bribe from Harry early on to say he couldn't find him when Nancy first runs back to town, shouting about a spaceship and a giant. Naturally, because of her troubled history, he and Dubbitt don't actually believe her wild claims and only go

out to the spot where she saw it in order to humor her; of course, they find nothing. But, when Jess calls Dubbitt on Harry when he tries to skip town with Honey the following night, Charlie, this time, is good enough to turn down his bribe and takes him to the police station. Dubbitt gets nothing out of Harry when he tries to get him to talk about what happened when he and Nancy drove out into the desert, as he claims it never happened, but Dr. Cushing assures him that anything Jess says can be taken as the truth. Following the discovery of Nancy's becoming a giant, the two lawmen find giant footprints leading to the pool house, and Dubbitt has Charlie get them some guns and grenades, as he and Jess follow the footprints out into the desert. They find the spaceship, as well as the alien and numerous diamonds akin to Nancy's Star of India inside the ship, but while they manage to escape, the alien destroys their car, forcing them to walk back to town. Meanwhile, when the gigantic Nancy starts coming to, the nurse gets a hold of Charlie at the sheriff's office and he, in turn, goes to tell Harry what's going on. Naturally, Harry couldn't care less and sends Charlie away. When he heads to the Archer house afterward, he meets Dubbitt and Jess just as they return from the desert, and they arrive at the house just after Nancy has broken out and headed for town, searching for Harry. They follow her and, when they see Nancy attacking the hotel, Charlie tries to warn Harry of what's happening, only to then get caught up in Nancy's assault on the bar. He finds he can't shoot a woman, even a giant woman, prompting Harry to take his gun and start shooting wildly at her. In the end, Dubbitt is the one stops Nancy, though unintentionally, as he accidentally shoots and blows up a power transformer next to her, killing both her and Harry.

Dr. Cushing (Roy Gordon), Nancy's family physician, is called in by Harry in to examine her following her claims of what she saw the night before. Though Harry hopes Cushing would find enough cause to put her back in the institution, the doctor instead insists that she just needs a good rest and tells Harry to be patient and understanding with her, saying she seems to find some comfort around him. But then, when she disappears and is later found on top of her pool house, Cushing, after sedating her and finding evidence that she was exposed to some kind of radiation, learns of Harry's infidelity. What's more, when Harry says Jess is lying about his and Nancy going out into the desert together, Cushing speaks up for him, insisting to Sheriff Dubbitt that Jess is someone who can be trusted. When Nancy starts to grow into a giant, Cushing finds himself in over his head and calls in a specialist, Dr. Heinrich Von Loeb (Otto Waldis), only him to admit he's unable to provide any answer, only suggesting there may be hope if they perform surgery on Nancy. Unfortunately, they need to Harry's consent to do so, and he starts hiding out with Honey to make sure that doesn't happen. Near the end of the movie, Cushing talks about how he's known Nancy her entire life and has seen the sad road she's taken in recent years, as well as admits he pressed her into taking Harry back, which he now regrets; Von Loeb, in turn, can only suggest, "When women reach the age of maturity, Mother Nature sometimes overworks the frustration to the point of irrationalism. Like the middle aged man, of our age, who finds himself looking longingly at the girl in her early 20s." When Nancy begins to awaken, the doctors try to keep her sedated but no amount of morphine proves to be enough for the giant and she breaks out to search for Harry. At the end of the movie, when both she and Harry have meet their end, Cushing closes it with the solemn line, "She finally got Harry all to herself."

Many may view Attack of the 50 Foot Woman as a prime example of a "so bad, it's good" movie but, in my opinion, the way the story is told makes it just plain bad and not entertaining. As I said in the introduction, the movie's first act has you watching Nancy Archer suffer emotionally from the crappy lot in life she's been given, the saddest part of which is her inability to sever herself from Harry, even though she knows it's a toxic relationship and that he only cares about her considerable fortune. The most pitiful moment is

when she admits she took him back because she can't help but love him, despite the awful person he is, and then, after she tells Harry about what she saw, he picks her up and takes her to bed, only to slip out to go see Honey again, ignoring Nancy's drunken, half-asleep pleading with him to stay with her. It's a decent enough setup and Allison Hayes' performance is quite good and makes you hope that, when she become the 50 Foot Woman, she'll really exact revenge on Harry. But then, following

Nancy's abduction and sudden reappearance, the movie takes a major nosedive. Since she's kept sedated for the entirety of the film's middle when she starts to become a giant, we get no insight into how this affects her personally. In fact, when she does awaken and heads towards town while searching for Harry, she doesn't acknowledge what's become of her, as her mind is so dead-set on getting both him and Honey. As a result, the focus switches first to Harry and how

this unexpected turn of events affects his plan to rid himself of Nancy and get a hold of her money, then to the doctors as they try to figure out what's happening to her, as well as Sheriff Dubbitt and Jess following the giant footprints out into the desert and encountering the alien, and it's all a real snore. But then, worst of all, the climax, as I'll describe in detail shortly, does not give you the payoff you were hoping for, nor your money's worth of what the title promises.

The movie was shot for a very meager budget of around $88,000 and it shows, as it looks very, very cheap. The cinematography is just so-so and I think it's a foregone conclusion that the nighttime exterior scenes were done day-for-night; as a result of that, combined with black and white, it can be hard to tell what's going on unless you're watching a really good print. The sets are also nothing special, be they the dance-floor of the bar Harry and Honey often frequent, the small hotel room Honey stays in, or the interiors of the large house Nancy owns,

which looks nice enough but you don't see much of it apart from the den, Nancy's bedroom, and the pool area outside. Even the inside of the alien spacecraft, the set that should be a real knockout, comes off as cheap, as you never get a wide-shot of it, with the whole thing being shot in extreme close-up instead, it's filled with steam that's obviously meant to hide the fact that it's a small and unimpressive space, and has few details apart from some grid-lined walls, an unearthly glow to it, and, most memorably, diamonds akin to the Star of

India being kept in clear spheres that look like fishbowls (they actually put an image of a close-up of Jess' face being distorted by one of them on the back of the DVD, as if that were meant to be one of the movie's more horrifying aspects... which, it kind of is). What's more, the inside of this ship, as well as the outside, is far too small to house an alien as large as this one, and it's hard to imagine him managing to get out of the ship without tearing it apart. Location-wise, however, I do like

that the movie takes place in a small town out in the California desert, which proved to be a great and popular setting for sci-fi movies in the 50's, such as in It Came from Outer Space, Tarantula, and The Monolith Monsters, and the shots of the location when Nancy and Harry are looking for the spaceship do have the same kind of eerie atmosphere to them that can be felt in those films.

With any bad, low-budget sci-fi flick of the time, you expect the special effects to be especially laughable and that's certainly the case here. First off, due to the miniscule budget, they attempted to keep both the giant alien (Michael Ross, who also plays the bartender, Tony) and the 50 Foot Woman herself offscreen as much as possible. To that end, they made considerable use of this big, rubber hand for when the alien reaches for Nancy, for much of the movie's middle portion when Nancy's becoming a giant herself, and when she reaches

into buildings to try to find and grab onto Harry. The thing is horribly floppy in the way it moves, especially the fingers (the version of it meant to Nancy has hideously long fingernails), and when it goes to grab someone, you can tell that they could very easily escape, as it has no gripping power at all. But, as bad as that is, it's nothing compared to the wide shots of the giants walking around. For one, the matting and compositing on those shots is so bad that they're often either see-through or have a hazy glow about them, and for another,

when Nancy is walking through town during the climax, they reuse the exact same shot of her, the only difference being the background. Moreover, the perspective of the latter is sometimes off, making her look nowhere near fifty feet, and there's one moment where people are running and pointing at one side of the screen, only for her to enter the frame on the other! During the scene where Sheriff Dubbitt and Jess encounter the alien giant at his spaceship out in the desert (said

spaceship is also a poorly matted in element every time you get a look at it), there's a moment where he picks up the station wagon they used to drive out there and the entire film frame budges upward! The shot cuts before it can go too far and it's only onscreen for a fraction of a second, but when you see it, it's mind-blowing. Really, the only good effects shots to be found here are when you're looking at Allison Hayes walking around and smashing a miniature set, and even then, it's

average at best, not to mention, when Nancy pulls Harry up through the club's smashed open roof, he's replaced with a doll that's not only horribly fake and flimsy but makes Harry look far bigger than he should be. Also, there's a shot at the end of the movie of her lying dead on the street, with Harry also dead in her open hand and the townspeople gathering behind her body, that's done fairly well.

Bad special effects are one thing, but what hurts the movie's enjoyment factor even more is that the scenes with the monsters are not fun to watch. Both the giant alien and Nancy when she becomes the title monster are uninteresting, the former being just a bald guy in a vest, while the latter is a giant woman who's wearing what basically amounts to a bikini that, I guess, is made out of bed sheets. Save for the giant being intrigued by Nancy's diamond, one of many such gems he's collected as a possible means of powering his ship,

and Nancy's obsession with Harry having now been amplified to match her size, they have no personality, and except for Nancy's yelling for Harry in her big, booming voice, they don't make a sound, not even thundering footsteps. And the scenes involving them are hampered by both the lousy special effects and a lack of excitement, as they're very slow-moving (both the giants themselves and the pace of the scenes), with no sense of urgency, and the destruction caused is

nothing to write home about. Actually, the big scene where Sheriff Dubbitt and Jess flee the alien consists of little more than the two of them running and hiding behind the station wagon, Dubbitt shooting at him and tossing a grenade that hits him in the chest, his lifting up and slamming the station wagon down to the ground (all of which is down in extreme close-up, so you don't get any notable money shots), and him getting back into his spaceship and flying off, forcing the two humans to walk out of the desert.

And as I've already said, the movie really drops the ball when it comes to what you pay to see in the first place. You only see the gigantic Nancy in all her glory at the 56-minute mark, when there's only nine minutes left in the whole film, and her "attack" is not worth the wait. After she breaks out of her house (like the alien, how she could fit inside that small bedroom up is anyone's guess), she heads towards the town, startling an old prospector when he sees her walk by, and momentarily plays with a high voltage tower,

causing the lights to go out at the bar where Harry and Honey are for a couple of minutes. She then startles a young couple who were parked and kissing, heads into town, and makes her way to the hotel, ripping its sign off the front and smashing her hand through the window of an unoccupied room. Not finding Harry there, she turns her attention to the club across from the hotel and starts shaking the building while calling for Harry, before reaching her hand in. In a panic,

Harry takes Deputy Charlie's gun from him and fires at Nancy's hand, prompting her to rip the entire roof off, crushing Honey underneath some falling debris, and then grabbing and hoisting Harry out. When everyone sees this, Dubbitt fires on Nancy but his bullets have no effect, so he trades in his handgun for a rifle. He continues firing on her when she walks by a power transformer, which is hit by one of his rounds and explodes, causing her to drop to the ground, die from her wounds... and that's that. As I've said, the lousy special effects and sluggish pace of the action keep this sequence from being as entertaining as it probably sounds.

And yet, despite all these shortcomings, the movie has had something of an impact on pop-culture, as it's been referenced many, many times in various films and TV shows, and has even been remade and outright spoofed now and then. The title itself is even well-known among both film fans and casual moviegoers, even though a good majority of them have probably never seen the actual movie, and it makes me wonder why. Why are so many better sci-fi and monster movies made around the same time as Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, as well as The

Amazing Colossal Man and War of the Colossal Beast, the two movies that inspired it, not as well-known? Maybe it has to do with the very notion of its being about a woman who's grown to a gargantuan size. While there are nine million giant monster movies, there are very few that deal with strictly giant people, and even fewer where it's a woman, so it does stand out. It might also be seen by some as an example of female empowerment, with this giant woman being able to

easily crush any man who gets in her way, as well as use her newfound might to take revenge on her cheating, sleazebag husband (although, in the case of the latter, Nancy instead seems determined to have Harry all to herself to the bitter end, which she ultimately does). Some have even read it as being the ultimate example of the notion that a really tall woman is socially unacceptable, likening it to a forerunner of the body horror genre. Whatever it is, there's no denying that this movie has struck a cord with a number of people, much more so than many of its peers.

As with nearly everything else concerning this movie, the music score is sadly unremarkable. It was composed by Ronald Stein, who scored a lot of low budget sci-fi and horror movies around this time, including a number of Roger Corman's films like It Conquered the World, Not of This Earth, Attack of the Crab Monsters, The Little Shop of Horrors, and The Terror, information that makes more of an impression of his music here. Seriously, I cannot remember any of it and can only generally describe it as typical bombastic monster movie music, with occasional bits of weird music for the more otherworldly aspects of the story and some sympathetic pieces for Nancy's plight and the tragedy that befalls her.

It may have a strong cult following and is one of the most well-known giant monster movies of the 1950's but, for me, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman is a really shitty movie that's not even entertaining because it's bad. While Allison Hayes does give a pretty good performance as the emotionally tortured Nancy, William Hudson and Yvette Vickers are both suitably despicable as Harry and Honey, you do get a genuinely decent character in Nancy's butler, Jess, and the desert on the outskirts of the town has some natural atmosphere to it, everything else about it is utter crap. The film looks and feels really cheap, 99% of the special effects are totally horrendous, the monsters have nothing that makes them memorable save for the fact that one of them is a giant woman, the music score is forgettable, there's no energy or excitement to the scenes you'd pay to see, and, worst of all, the movie doesn't deliver on what the title promises until less than ten minutes before it's over and even then, it's lackluster and disappointing. While some may be curious about the movie simply because they've heard of the title, I would recommend just about any other monster or sci-fi movie of the period.