Village of the Giants

After the grooviest opening credits ever filmed, complete with dancing, VILLAGE OF THE GIANTS begins... with dancing! Mud dancing in fact! Within seconds, junior scientist, "Genius" (Ron Howard) invents a formula that turns the family cat into an elephantine feline! Aided by his big sister and her boyfriend, Mike (Tommy Kirk), other animals are soon enlarged. More dancing breaks out! Whew! Giant ducks cut a rug!

Oh no!

Local bad boy, Fred (Beau Bridges) and his cadre of dancing delinquents decide to abscond with the formula for their own purposes. Hilarity ensues.

VILLAGE is another Bert I. Gordon production, loosely based of FOOD OF THE GODS by H.G. Wells. A lighthearted film, best enjoyed after one's cranium has been emptied of its content...

Bert I. Gordon's "Village of the Giants" is a humorously poor version of the "big thing make boom" movies in which a small group (Maybe 6, hardly a full village) of teens take a formula that makes them grow really big, talk really slow, and move like they are dying one breath at a time. It's all rather silly, and quite funny if you're up for this kind of movie. Of course, it's not funny in the way Gordon intended. Was it ever?

Tommy Kirk, also of the classic "Mars Needs Women" is fooling around with his lady friend in the start of the film, when Ronny Howard (Still with a full head o' hair, and answering to the modest name "Genius") creates a formula that makes things grow. When the no-good drifter teens get their hands on it, they cause some real trouble, and it's up to Tommy and Ronny to stop the chaosy.

The best scene is the first in which the teens appear before the town. They show up at an outdoor barbecue, and everyone is afraid, but really, not so afraid that they run away or anything, they just kind of look up and gasp a lot. So then the giants are making threats, and Tommy, in a fit of rage and large hair, picks up a chair (That just happened to be sitting around outside in a park) and breaks it over the giants legs (They pretend, use your imagination). He goes "Ow!" and then backfists Tommy who gets whalloped. Very nicely done.

The whole film takes place in a vacuum. No one seems to be much surprised or worried by the giants ducks that show up out of nowhere in the Whiskey A Go-Go and start dancing. They just kind of go along with it. Nor is anyone interested in calling the government in when the teens take over the town. They just sort of go with it. And really when these giants move as slow as they do, why would anyone be afraid of them? You can always outrun them, or if they try something, take two steps to the left. Bert I. Gordon, if you'll pardon the expression, just wasn't thinking "big" enough in this movie to really deal with the consequences of his ideas. The end is so banal and rather anti-climactic, especially for what is essentially a monster movie.

All in all, "Village of the Giants" is low on logic, but high on some good laughs, most at its expense.

A group of teenagers become giant sized.

Before this film, we had other "giant movies", such as The Incredible Shrinking Man, but a recent YouTube viewing of Village Of The Giants has made me wonder if "Village" is the best of the lot. It has a sense of B-Grade fun that is hard to capture on film...without looking too stupid that is. The dance scene alone, with the little boy grabbing the giant girl, makes the film a winner. And note the music for the dance scene.

Story elements, character names (Genius) and Ron Howard were all shifted into a Land Of The Giants (1968,ABC) episode called...Genius At Work.

Attention Hollywood: Don't remake this film today, "Village" is a product of the 1960s, it is about the 1960s mentality and 1960s music!

The film is a wonderfully casted and wonderfully scored knockout!

Loosely...and I mean loosely based on H. G. Wells's The Food of the Gods, director/producer/writer Bert I. Gordon, Mr BIG himself, brings us a tale about a roving gang of teen thugs(nothing like today' s variation)who walk to a small town surrounded by a mudslide. In that town, a young genius, creatively named "Genius" works on varying experiments. One of these experiments when fed to a living thing causes the living thing to grow to tremendous proportions. We first see ducks, then a dog, and finally a tarantula. The gang takes the "food of the Gods" and gets big...and you can figure what happens for the most part after that. Highly unimaginative and lewd, Village of the Giants is really more concerned with showing beautiful scantily clad girls in tight polyester slacks and bikini tops grow to epic proportions. We see them literally bust out of their garments. They wear toga-like outfits, dance sensuously, bend over as much as possible to give the greatest vantage point to their cleavage, and so on. One giant girl even picks a "small" man up and has him hang from her top while she dances. The girls are all babes. Joy Harmon is stunning as is Tisha Sterling. But my gripe is...what's the point of presenting this as science fiction if all you really want to do is make this type of film? The acting ranges from OK(Ronny Howard is better than everyone else!), less than adequate(most of the gang including its leader Beau Bridges), to just bad(Tommy Kirk). Typical Bert Gordon special effects are here too. As mentioned by many other viewers, the music is really the best thing about the movie - well, next to Joy Harmon and Tisha Sterling and the other gang girls!

This film opens with a group of presumably drugged out teens emerging from their rather badly wrecked automobile, only to dance around it maniacally and flop in the mud. Before long, one of them gets the idea to "go into town and make a little noise" or some such rot, and the fun begins when they run into giant ducks in the local dance parlor. These giants are the product of a goo accidentally created by a Opie-era "Ronny" Howard, who goes by the 'nickname' genius.

Amazingly, a sniveling Beau Bridges is the gangleader and they find the goo and dare each other to eat it, then halfheartedly try to run the town. See the spineless Tommy Kirk bust a rigged chair on a giant fake leg!!

See Beau Bridges and the fairly hot Toni Basil and another hot girl traipse around in curtain-like toga-sarongs! See director Bert I. Gordon make even more of an ass out of himself than ever and feel his ire as Mike and the bots tear him to shreds as usual! Laugh along as Tom Servo wrestles with his aversion to the movie "Willow", which he fantasizes was budding in young Ronny Howard's mind even then! And through it all, thrill to the exhilarating surf tones of the fabulous Beau Brummels! At least it's in technicolor.