Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958)

Nancy Archer (Allison Hayes), a wealthy, mentally unstable alcoholic, sees a “satellite” and a 30 foot giant one night in the desert. Her gold-digging creep of a husband (William Hudson) hopes to use her report as a way to have her put away so he can spend his time with the local tramp (Yvette Vickers), who wears long gowns while dancing at a cheap little diner. But Mrs. Archer’s encounter has the delayed effect of causing her to grow to giant size.

A major member of the cheap, sci-fi, drive-in movement of the 1950s, along with The Amazing Colossal Man and The Giant Gila Monster, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman is a bad film in many ways, but it has its charms. It isn’t boring or slow and I imagine it did its job for teenagers in 1958, just as I enjoyed it as a kid in the ‘70s on Saturday afternoon TV. The special effects are terrible, but the actors are surprisingly good—giving more depth to each silly moment than I would have thought possible. Allison Hayes and Yvette Vickers, both extremely attractive women, stand out, though the entire cast is solid. That might be due to director Nathan Juran (billed as Nathan Hertz), who is best known for The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, and was the art director of Harvey and How Green Was My Valley. If his skills with FX were weak, he was much stronger in filming actors on the cheap than those normally helming these sorts of films.

The trick of the flick is that it keeps the non-sci-fi moments moving. With cheapies like this, there’s a tendency to fill out the runtime with drab chatting. Here we get soap-opera melodrama that’s as entertaining at the giants. Vickers’s Honey Parker is hypnotically slutty while the husband defines snake. It may not be art, but it’s entertaining.

Of course the iconic shot of a giant, angry, pin-up really does the trick. The poster does a better job than the film itself with the image of the hot giant woman, but it works in both cases.

Writer Mark Hanna was not on the cutting edge of science. He thought the word “satellite” meant a round spaceship, so that’s how it is used in the picture. In a more solemn movie, that would be a flaw; here it is part of the fun.

For 1958, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman is a feminist statement, and I suspect Men’s Rights Activists and similar alt-right folks would find it to be one now. This isn’t about an evil giant, but a woman getting the power to strike back. No, you don’t want to take the message, or anything about this film, too seriously, but it is there if you want it.