L'Attaque de la femme de 50 pieds

What happens when a wealthy woman meets a giant opaque alien and his satellite in the desert. Why she ends up becoming a 50 foot woman bent on fixing her marriage with her adulterous husband! Great 50's hokum here! Lovely Allison Hayes plays a woman who has recently been checked out of a sanitorium and has major drinking/marriage problems. Her husband Harry is the scum of the earth as he flirts(and beyond) with beautiful Honey(Vickers). Both of them want Allison's money, all 50 million of it. The story is pretty ambiguous, and we really never do know just who or what that alien was all about. The best part is seeing just how low and sleazy Harry is, so we can wait to see him get his. The acting is pretty good, nothing great. The direction by Nathan Juran is adequate(nothing like what you would see in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad!). The special effects are fairly standard as we really never see Allison Hayes as a fully-materialized giant. She always seems to be a bit transparent for some reason except when we see her giant hand. Hayes looks great as a giant though in her skimpy shorts and bikini top, giving at least two great reasons to see the film...or is that three? Great 50's sci-fi fun!

How can you NOT like this film? It's very absurdity makes it an instant classic. What absurdity you ask? Well how about the fact that when the sheriff (George Douglas) and Jess the butler (Ken Terrell) enter the giant's space ship everything is scaled to our size? How about the fact that when the giant (Mike Ross) picks up the sheriff's car it's a station wagon, when he throws it to the ground it's a sedan, and when the sheriff checks the wreckage it's a station wagon again? Or maybe the fact that Alison Hayes height seems to vary from scene to scene; sometimes she's a mere 18 feet tall and in others she is much larger. Did I, or should I?, mention that you can see right through both giants in almost every scene?

And when she reaches through the roof of the bar to pick up her philandering husband (William Hudson, who also went face-to-ankle with THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN a year earlier) why didn't they cut the scene before you saw the doll Alison was picking up had no legs? Should I even mention the fact that this movie is set in California and the deputy (Frank Chase) has a Boston accent ("Hi ya Mistah Ahhhhcha!")?

You can spot Ken Terrell doing stunts in most of the Republic serials during the 40's. Roy Gordon (Dr. Cushing) appeared in THE WASP WOMAN in 1959, Yvette Vickers (Honey Parker) had a run-in with giant bloodsuckers in ATTACK OF THE GIANT LEECHES. And Alison Hayes . . .ah, she was my dream girl when I was growing up.

Let the sourpusses deride this film, I think it's great fun. Don't waste your time with the remake, THIS is the one to catch.

This film has to be one of my all time favorite bad movies. I used to watch it often as kid on New York City's WPIX Channel 11's Chiller Theater. The special effects(ha!) are dreadful, the dialog laughable, the acting non-existent, but I still loved it! Sultry knockout Allison Hayes wasn't a terrific actress, but she sure looked good! As a kid I remember thinking that her husband HARRY! was a big dope. Why would he want that pinch-faced blonde, when he had gorgeous, sexy and stacked Nancy to come home to every night? What a moron. Finally available on DVD after many years (Warner Bros. has distributed it but I was hoping for a better restoration--oh well)....it's still a pleasure to watch.

This is every philandering husband's worst nightmare—a 50-foot wife full of angry revenge. Could that subtext be what turned this clumsy Z-grade sci-fi into a cult favorite. Certainly, it's not the special effects. The two giants look more like flimsy apparitions than flesh and blood realities, and worse, move with all the dispatch of sleepwalking turtles. Really scary if you're a garden slug.

Neither can it be the lame comedy relief from the deputy (Chase), who makes Barney Fife of Mayberry look like a brain surgeon. Nor is it the boilerplate scenes from a hundred other sci- fi specials of the time.

No. I figure that what grips the popular imagination is the feminist subtext. After all, think of wife Nancy (Hayes) not as 50-feet tall, but as an ordinary sized woman, except she's got 50- feet of powerful rage against a no-good husband who she's been dependent on as in the movie.

Now, one thing the film does really well is make you sympathize with the vulnerable wife. Those scenes of hubby (Hudson) cuddling with the trampy Honey (Vickers) are little gems of tacky love. The slinky Vickers is perfectly cast, lending real satisfaction to that 50-feet of slow-motion revenge.

So maybe a lot of wives or will-be-wives seeing the movie feel—what's the word—oh yeah, "empowered". At the same time, guys may think it's the scariest movie ever made. Either way, the giant woman idea turns this Z-grade dreck into something memorable.

Surprisingly this late 50's Sci-Fi feature isn't all that bad. Decent acting and filming make it one of those Black and White science fiction numbers that's entertaining and fun to watch. The last line in this motion picture is an underrated classic among closing lines. Superior to the 90 something remake.