Attack of the 50 Foot Woman
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| Attack of the 50 Foot Woman | |
 Original theatrical poster by Reynold Brown |
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| Directed by | Nathan H. Juran |
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| Produced by | Bernard Woolner |
| Written by | Mark Hanna |
| Starring | Allison Hayes William Hudson Yvette Vickers |
| Music by | Ronald Stein |
| Distributed by | Allied Artists Pictures Corporation |
| Release date(s) | 19 May 1958 |
| Running time | 65 min. |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $88,000 |
Attack of the 50 Foot Woman is a 1958 science fiction feature film produced by Bernard Woolner for Allied Artists Pictures. It was directed by Nathan H. Juran (credited as Nathan Hertz) from a screenplay by Mark Hanna, and starred Allison Hayes, William Hudson and Yvette Vickers. The original music score was composed by Ronald Stein. The film was a take on other movies that had also featured size-changing humans, namely The Amazing Colossal Man and The Incredible Shrinking Man, but substituting a woman as the protagonist.
The story concerns the plight of Nancy Archer, a wealthy heiress whose close encounter with an enormous alien being causes her to grow into a giantess. She uses her new size and power to seek revenge against her philandering husband Harry and his mistress, Honey Parker.
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[edit] Plot
Allison Hayes stars as Nancy Archer, whose husband Harry (William Hudson) wants the US $50 million she recently inherited from her father so he can abandon her and live it up with his young mistress Honey Parker (Yvette Vickers). After catching Harry flirting with Honey during a Friday night dance at a local bar, Nancy encounters a spaceship carrying an extraterrestrial thirty feet tall who, we later learn, needs diamonds to power his "satellite," as the craft is called throughout the movie. (The film was produced about two months after the launch of Sputnik, and was co-featured with the Roger Corman film War of the Satellites.) Nancy wears one of the largest "rocks" of all, the priceless Star of India diamond. The local sheriff initially scoffs at Nancy's tale, but humors her because the taxes she pays afford him and his deputy a comfortable salary. Harry sees what he regards as his wife's relapse into alcoholism as an opportunity to have Nancy committed to an asylum. The next afternoon, having summoned a psychiatrist to examine his wife, Harry agrees to drive Nancy, now seductively dressed in tight-fitting toreador pants, through the desert in search of the alien.
At sunset they find his satellite. Nancy pounds on the hull of the ship and, finally vindicated, shouts, "It's real! I'm not crazy!" thus rousing the interplanetary traveler inside. Finding the creature impervious to bullets, Harry flees, leaving Nancy at the giant's mercy. The alien intends his victim no personal harm; he only wants the Star of India. However, in seizing the diamond he scratches her throat causing Nancy to faint. He then takes the unconscious woman back to her home and leaves her on the roof of the poolhouse. Later, her doctor explains that she has apparently been exposed to some kind of radiation.
Egged on by Honey, Harry schemes to give Nancy a lethal dose of a "serum" with which she's being treated. Approaching her in the dark with Nancy's private nurse surreptitiously following him, he discovers that Nancy has grown to an enormous size. Nancy's doctors want to operate to stop her growth, but they need Harry's permission to begin the procedure. Imagining his wife to be incapacitated, he leaves home and spends the evening drowning his sorrows in a bar with Honey while awaiting Nancy's demise. Doctors manage to sedate and restrain her massive form as the sheriff and the Archers' butler follow the giant's footprints and discover his satellite. When they attempt to reclaim the stolen diamond, they are chased away and their car demolished before the spacecraft takes off. By nightfall Nancy is too large to restrain. Wrapping sheets around her body, she escapes by tearing the roof off her own mansion. "I know where my husband is!" she exclaims, heading toward town. "He's with that woman! I'll find him." Cornering the cheating lovers, she rips the roof off the bar in which they're hiding and hurls a beam onto Honey, killing her. She then picks up Harry and carries him away like a rag doll (which is the prop that was actually used in this scene). The sheriff fires a riot gun at an electrical transformer just as Nancy passes it. This electrocutes her as well as her husband, whom she only wanted to herself, thus ending the movie.
[edit] Remakes and Sequels
With its low budget -- the movie was made for around $88,000 -- Attack of the 50 Foot Woman made enough money to prompt discussion of a sequel. According to producer Jacques Marquette, the sequel was to be produced at a higher budget, and in color. A script was also written, though the project never advanced beyond the discussion phase.[1]
In the mid-1980s, filmmaker Jim Wynorksi was considering a remake of the 1958 movie, with Sybil Danning in the title role.[2] Wynorski made it as far as a shooting a photo session with Danning dressed as the 50 foot woman[3] but, again, the project never materialized, as Wynorksi opted to film the 1988 remake of Not Of This Earth instead.[4]
The film was finally remade in a 1993 HBO movie, Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman. The film, directed by Christopher Guest with a script by Thirtysomething scribe Joseph Dougherty, starred Daryl Hannah in the title role.
[edit] 1995 parody
In 1995, Fred Olen Ray produced a parody entitled Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfold, starring J. J. North and Tammy Parks. Beyond the basic premise, the plot had little in common with the original movie, being concerned with the side-effects of a beauty-enhancing formula on two ambitious girl models. The movie was deliberately farcical and made on an extremely low budget; the illusion of size-difference was achieved using forced perspective, unlike the earlier movies which used composite imaging.
[edit] In popular culture
- This Clip of Nancy throwing the car, from "The Attack of the 50 Foot Woman" was used to end the Original Opening Sequence of WPIX Channel 11 New York's "Chiller Theatre" back in the 1960s
- Clips from the movie are spoofed in the music video for Neil Finn's 1998 single "She Will Have Her Way".
- Clips from the movie theme and related merchandise and scenario were used in the video clip for the song "Call Me" from the 80s pop music group Go West.
- Various animated television series have referenced the film, usually in episodes which involve a female character becoming giant-sized. For example, the Challenge of the Superfriends from 1978 features the origins of superhero Apache Chief and super-villaness Giganta.[5]
- Terry Pratchett's "Discworld" book Moving Pictures climaxes with a giant, 50 foot woman carrying a screaming ape up a tall tower. This is also an inversion of the ending of King Kong, with flying wizards on broomsticks taking the place of the aeroplanes.
- The iconic Movie Poster has previously been parodied with a similar poster entitled Attack of the 50 ft Christ.
- The Movie was also homaged in Marvel Adventures: The Avengers #13, a story entitled Attack of the Fity-Foot Girl!, spotlighting Avengers member Giant-Girl. the cover of this issue was also based upon the Movie's Poster.
- In the anime series Lucky Star, Hiyori has a delusion resembling the poster for the film, with her classmate Yutaka as the giant woman.
- A commercial was made that played on MTV2 which was a Buddy Lee advertisement that had a 90 ft. Women walking in the city.
- On the UK TV show Coupling, the character Jeff Murdock has the movie poster on the wall of his apartment.
- One episode of Mo Willems´ Sheep in the Big City features a spoof called "Attack of the 50 Foot Creature", referring to a monster made of 50 human feet.
- Preschool Tea Party Massacre, a Cyber-Grind band has the Attack of the 50 Foot Women as their album cover for the album Return to the Bone Concubine.
- An episode of the 1998 Warner Bros. cartoon Toonsylvania called "Attack of the 50-Footed Woman" was about a woman who, through nuclear mutation, grows 50 feet tall, and also grows 50 legs.
- In an episode of Ed, Edd n Eddy entitled "May I Have this Ed?", Ed makes casual conversation with a mock-up woman by talking about a B movie entitled Attack of the 50 Foot TV Tray.
- In DreamWorks' movie Monsters vs. Aliens, the character Susan Murphy (voiced by Reese Witherspoon) grows to 49ft 11 1/2 in after being hit by a meteor, a nod to the original 50 foot woman
- In the Treehouse of Horror XVII segment "I Married the Blob" episode of The Simpsons, while Homer attack the city as a giant blob a "50 foot Lenny" also attacks, though he states that everyone is paying attention to Homer.
- An episode of Phineas and Ferb called "Attack of the 50 Foot Sister" has Candace using her brothers' potion to grow a few inches. However, she gets more than what she bargained for.
In the 1988 cult classic film Saturday The 14th- Strike Back, the oldest sister Linda Baxter, played by Julianne McNamara, becomes a 50 foot women and is stuck inside her house. We only see her hand (which she closes on her father who is trying to come into her room to see her and she closes it in his face from embarrassment), her eye which is looking outside a window and a on looking neighbor sees it, and we hear her voice. There is no explanation on how she became big but she turns back to normal size at the end of the film.
[edit] Availability
The original Attack of the 50 Foot Woman was released on DVD by Warner Bros. on June 26, 2007. It includes an audio commentary with co-star Yvette Vickers and interviewer Tom Weaver.
