Island Claws

Reporter Jan Raines (Jo McDonnell) is doing a feature story on the creative lab experiments on crabs by Dr. McNeal (Barry Nelson, the original 007). Naturally, something goes awry, but it isn't in the lab. See Jan's dad Frank just happens to own the local nuclear power plant and they just happened to accidentally dumped 40,000 of radioactive water into the nearby sea, creating one muther of a killer crab. Did I mention that Frank also just happens to be rivals with the Moody (Robert Lansing), the town bar owner who plays surrogate father to Jan's hunky lab assistant love interest Pete (Steve Hanks)? And did I mention Frank just happened to have killed Pete's parents in a drunk driving accident years ago? With all this "just happens" drama, who cares about killer crabs?

Crabs? Seriously, crabs? Yup, the little crustacean creeps are the main villains in the Florida lensed horror flick. One can only laugh during the early scenes where people are attacked by normal sized crabs. I mean, is it too much to close a door or, I don't know, run quickly in the opposite direction? To the film's credit, there is one huge 12-foot crab dashing about, but it only shows up on screen in the last ten minutes. I'll admit the design is pretty impressive for a low budget film. The script (co-written by the Creature from the Black Lagoon himself, Ricou Browning) is all over the place though. Despite Frank Raines being the cause of all this madness, he never gets his comeuppance. In fact, he is only shown once in the entire film. And, if you have a big ol' crab, you better blow it up. Here, they just poison it and it slumps down. Director Hernan Cardenas was one and done with this flick. Lansing earned his "battling big creatures" street cred with EMPIRE OF THE ANTS (1977) and continued in this fine line of work with killer cockroaches in THE NEST (1988).

Scientists working on the development of meatier crabs, use water from a nearby bay in their crab tanks.

Oh no!

A nuclear power plant has had an "incident", releasing radioactive water into the very same bay! Soon, the bay-area crabs are on the move.

Meanwhile, it's crab-racing time down at Moody's (Robert Lansing) saloon. There's also a hoedown, complete with blistering banjo jams! Simultaneously, the crabs have gathered outside in the woods, and they look... crabby!

A short time later, the banjo player -who lives in a school bus- has a crab problem, and must use his beloved banjo as a defensive weapon. Too bad there's a Crab Of Enormous Size in the mix, since banjos have no effect on them! It's not long before no one is safe from these sidling abominations and their gargantuan leader!

ISLAND CLAWS is the perfect treat for fans of the giant crab sub-sub-genre. It falls somewhere between ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS and MYSTERIOUS ISLAND on the colossal crustacean chart. The mob of meandering crabs are reminiscent of the hopping amphibians in FROGS. As for the humongous horror itself, it's pretty much saved for the crab-tastic finale, which is -of course- the best part of the movie.

EXTRA POINTS FOR: #1- Figuring out how / why the monster crab roars like the mutant bear in PROPHESY! #2- Discerning just what part of Ireland is represented by Moody's "accent"! #3- Resisting the urge to purchase a banjo by movie's end!...

This was perhaps one of the funniest movies I've seen in a long time. Because it was bad (of course!). There is no reason to sit through this movie seriously like you would with "Schindler's List" or even "Fletch". Talk with your friends through it. Laugh. Make comments. PLEASE!!!! The plot involves little crabs ganging up on people and killing a few (the best scene is where all the tiny crabs manage to overturn a trailer home and catch it on fire). There's a giant paper mache-looking crab too, but I wasn't too sure of its purpose. That goes to show how bad this film was. When you don't know why they had the giant crab (it appears on the box! grrrrr! beware humans!), then it's a bad bad movie.

A radiation leak causes crabs to mutate. One of them becomes a giant 8 foot crab, but most of them become ... normal looking crabs. The normal crabs do nasty things like burn down the trailer of a banjo player. Large bunches of normal crabs scuttling around are not very threatening. This film doesn't really work on any level. Veteran actors Robert Lansing and Barry Nelson are here, but unfortunately Steve Hanks is the nominal star and he's such a terrible actor that he can't manage to do normal tasks like pouring a cup of coffee without looking stiff and awkward.

I always feel bad when I rip on a B-movie. Most of the films in my DVD collection involve daft rubbery monsters and screaming victims. It's safe to say I don't consider myself to have a 'high bar' in terms of the movies I like and, as long as they can entertain me in one way or another, then I'm happy.

'Island Claws' is about a swarm of killer crabs on an island. Now, I've seen plenty of normal animals, always mutated to giant levels, stalking various hapless residents. So, when that's your kind of thing, killer crabs actually sound like fun.

Only there's no actual kills for roughly the first forty-five minutes and, I know the production budget isn't huge, but you'll see where it's been spent on when it comes to our clawed antagonists. There's lots of them. Some footage of real crabs has been interwoven with the anamatronic crabs created just for this. And the puppet crabs look good. In other words the look like regular crabs. But I was kind of hoping for more. Okay, so in the final act we got a - long overdue - giant crab, but there could have been at least one who shoots laser beams from his eye stalks, or something. Did I expect too much?

So the side-crawlers aren't up to much, but I guess they're a little more interesting than the humans who run around in the dark trying not to get their toes pinched by these clawed menaces.

In short, not much happens. Yes, it's a B-movie, so most of us don't expect Oscar-worthy performances, but, for all its eighties cheesiness, it's just not that fun to watch. I know remakes are often looked down on, but this is the rare occasion where I'd actually like to see one. Killer crabs is a good - but completely - silly, idea. So if it was done with a slightly higher budget and a script which knows it's tongue-in-cheek then you could actually be left with something that's quite fun.