Les Musaraignes tueuses

When will the doctors learn? On a desolate and exotic island a doctor with a heart of gold screws up and damn near destroys the world. Am I referring to Fulci's Zombie, no? How about that island with Marlon Brando? Nope, wrong again.

In the Killer Shrews this tome around on that deserted tropical island as seen a hundred times we have mutated shrews threatening to chomp down on our trapped scientists and a boat crew unlucky enough to be carting supplies to the island. Poisonous and hungry these shrews are gonna clean the island and suck the marrow from your bones…burp.

This fun little clichéd cheese fest moves along are a pretty quick pace. The acting is on par with the era, a bit over blown, but who cares. You have to love those shrew monsters. The effects are a bit *ahem* shrewd and laughable. Not to mention the long shots of the animals that appear to be dogs or maybe pigs dressed up in costumes, complete with tail. Good fun to be had by all with a hankering for b-grade sci-horror.

Having seen any number of bad movies, I can state that this is significantly better than most of them, and even better in part than movies not considered bad at all. However, in those aspects in which this movie is bad it is not merely bad, it is awful.

We have the usual formula of two-fisted hero (James Best), damsel in distress (Swedish Ingrid Goude), the damsel's mad-scientist father (non-Swedish Baruch Lumet), and the villain (Ken Curtis). The formula in this case is less clichéd than usual. The hero is fairly articulate and the mad scientist is actually quite urbane, tossing off his creation of hundreds of giant, poisonous, man-eating shrews with the line "unusual experiments lead to unusual results". The dialog is competently written and the acting is above par (with the exception of the Swedish eye-candy, who is at least good eye candy).

The general concept is compact and dramatically efficient: a group of people are trapped first by a hurricane and then by an outside menace in a stronghold which gets less and less strong as time, ammunition and group cohesion all grow short.

However the execution is at times illogical. One problem is that the stronghold is made out of...adobe. On a rainswept island crawling with usable timber? The thrilling conclusion is also somewhat implausible.

The main reason for the film's abysmal reputation is the legendary and quite obvious use of ordinary dogs in bathmats to play the part of giant shrews. I suppose this just has to be overlooked.

As a sidelight, it is interesting to see Dukes of Hazard sheriff James Best tall and handsome as the hero, and it is apparent that producer/villain Ken Curtis labored long and hard in the trenches before gaining fame as Festus.

This is one of my favorite all time schlocky movies from the fifties. The shrews themselves look like...well what they are, collies (or is it greyhounds?) in fur coats. The acting ranges from good (James Best, Ken Curtis) to non-existent (Ingrid Goude, Gorden McLendon.) The dialogue is lame. The editing bad and music poorly inserted; ominous music plays when James Best goes to wash his hands! That being said, I have to take exception with those that say giant shrews are a silly idea. Shrews are primitive mammals with high metabolism rates. They consume their own weight in food every couple of hours. They are known to attack animals larger than themselves. At least one species is mildly poisonous. The great naturalist Roger Carras, in his book, DANGEROUS TO MAN, in the chapter on poisonous mammals and montremes, states that shrews the size of collies would wreck unthinkable ecological havoc. Now you just learned something new.

"The Killer Shrews" is not so much a disaster as a by-product of its era, now dated and comical with audiences quite comfortable to enjoy such fodder in that context. With the passage of time, "The Killer Shrews" has achieved some measure of cult status. It's not as bad (technically) as its reputation anticipates; Kellogg's storyline is standard formula (experiments with a growth hormone result in mutated shrews that terrorise the inhabitants of a remote island, isolated by a hurricane), the acting is competent (particularly Best and Curtis), and the special effects are unintentionally funny.

In point of fact, the shrews are ably played by small dogs, fitted with rodent suits, but still move and act like, small dogs. Watching the 'pack' gallop up to the compound in which the stricken sailors and scientists are holed up, and seeing them claw and gnaw at the timber and stucco as their tails wag in anticipation no doubt of meaty-bites on the other side, is always unintentionally hilarious. One can only imagine how Ken Curtis felt as he was being licked and nuzzled by the 'voracious shrews', who apparently need to eat their body weight every day just to survive.

Functional dialogue is delivered well by Best and Curtis, but there's no mistaking former Miss Sweden Ingrid Goude's lack of thespian skills as she inanely affects shock, fear and general anxiety throughout the often tense proceedings. There's also a lot of time spent standing around a well stocked bar, nimbly throwing down martinis as the onslaught amasses outside. Aside from professionals Best and Curtis, Lumet isn't bad as the chief scientist and father to Goude, lamenting the unintended consequences of his ground-breaking research. The climax is novel and was subsequently used by Irwin Allen in a scene from "The Swarm". Camp, low budget entertainment that overcomes its limitations and deserves the minor cult status it carries today.

Long before Alexander Payne's 'Downsizing,' Ray Kellogg brought us this science-fiction epic about Baruch Lumet's cunning plan to curb overpopulation and its' effects on the world's resources by shrinking humans down to half their size. Sadly, before Dr. Lumet could save the world with his ingenious idea, the shrews he had been experimenting on mutated, growing to enormous sizes and becoming terribly ferocious (how his experiments yielded the exact opposite results that he was looking for is never explained). The creatures then broke loose, escaped his compound and fled into the forests of his isolated island. Now, they stalk the night, fangs bared, waiting to turn anyone they come across into mincemeat.

'The Killer Shrews' follows sea-captain Thorne Sherman- played by James Best- who is stranded on Lumet's island and- alongside the good doctor and his scientific accomplices- forced to battle the titular mutants for the sake of humanity itself. Trapped in the minimally decorated compound with shrews on every side, the gang drink endless martinis, rattle off ridiculous speeches and plot how to escape the island without becoming the ghastly creatures' next meal.

'The Killer Shrews' is a hilariously cheap-looking affair that is surely the prototypical film that's "so bad it's good." On every level the film is laughably inept, from the performances by the actors, to the set design and decoration and of course, the stars of the show, the shrews themselves. Although the coonhounds covered in shag carpet who play the shrews in long shots look better than the puppets used in close up, it's not by much. Kellogg designed the beasts himself, and he must have been drinking more martinis than his characters to be content with the finished product.

The cast have nothing to do but neck back martinis and recite ridiculous, poorly-written dialogue from Jay Simms's screenplay when they're not running from the shrews, so it's no wonder they all appear totally flummoxed. Lumet, who usually does fine work in small roles (see his brief appearance in his son Sidney's 'The Pawnbroker' for proof of this) here seems confused and a little scared by all the faux-scientific lines he has to spout throughout the film. Ingrid Goude, who plays his daughter, is just as out of her depth, with her wooden delivery and lack of screen presence betraying a dearth of acting talent.

James Best and Ken Curtis- who plays the alcoholic Jerry- come off the best, actually giving the film a bit of life and energy in its slower, martini-based moments between rampant shrew attacks. The other actors in the cast leave the same impression on the viewer as Lumet and Goude except they aren't nearly as memorable. The common denominator between them all is that they approach the material with an over-the-top earnesty and dead-pan seriousness that makes it all the funnier to hear lines like "those who hunt by night will tell you that the wildest and most vicious of all animals is the tiny shrew."

Then there's the set decoration- if it can even be called decoration- which is laughably sparse. Lumet's compound looks like a low-rent motel room from the 30's that someone stole all the furniture from; leaving only the bar in place. The laboratory where the shrew experimentations took place may be the least scientific-looking set ever captured on film, based entirely on the canny inclusion of a couple of microscopes and a few test tubes. Also, the score from Harry Bluestone and Emil Cadkin is so melodramatic and overblown it makes the music in your average soap opera seem practically subtle.

Everything about the film is funny because it's all so mediocre. Though there are a couple of half decent performances, the cast are generally hilarious, their dialogue ridiculous and the story they're trapped in completely fatuous. There is never any suspense in the film because the shrews are so obviously coonhounds and hand-puppets, not to mention the fact that Kellogg isn't a particularly talented director and would probably have struggled to create tension even if his shrews looked like the work of Ray Harryhausen.

'The Killer Shrews' is so entertaining because it's so Godawful, though people who don't find over-the-top ineptitude humorous might be left a little cold by the experience of watching the film. If you do find the awful and the melodramatic funny (like Claudio Fragasso's 'Troll 2') then watch 'The Killer Shrews.' It's not just so bad it's good; it's so bad it's brilliant.