Review: Village of the Giants (1966)

Only in the fevered mind of Bert I. Gordon, the writer/director of such cinematic low points as Beginning of the End, Earth vs. the Spider and the Colossal Man movies, could a twisted, tangled mess of a movie like Village of the Giants, in which "teenagers" (most of whom look like they've moved on to their post-graduate studies) grow to enormous size and terrorize a small town by taking over a theater, dancing to rock music and swinging frightened dudes from their now-enormous breasts, qualify as being "based on 'Food of the Gods' by H.G. Wells"! (That sound you now hear is Mr. Wells spinning in his grave.)

Village of the Giants manages to touch on more elements of bad drive-in filmmaking than just about any other movie I've ever seen. There's the whole good-teens-vs.-bad-teens thing left over from the Frankie and Annette beach movies, with the good kids here led by Tommy Kirk (star of many Disney flicks and looking way too old here), Johnny Crawford (Chuck Conner's son on The Rifleman and the lucky dope who gets to swing from the aforementioned huge boobs) and Ronnie Howard (Opie!) as Genius, a tot with a knack for science who accidentally comes up with a formula to make things grow (a plot device that Bert I. Gordon found fascinating, for whatever reason--wouldn't Freud have just adored Bert?).

We get to see a cat and a dog grow to mammoth proportions before the "goo" is fed to two ducks, who later turn up at a club and "dance" (with more than a little help from some very visible strings). The bad teens, headed up by Beau Bridges (Lloyd's son and Jeff's brother) and Tim Rooney (Mickey's kid), see the ducks as ample opportunity to make quick bucks and set about attempting to seduce the good kids over to the dark side.

(How do we know the bad kids are bad? The boys all wear sneers, the girls wear little else and all of them dance and mud-wrestle right after the opening credits. EVIL!)

The bad kids get hold of the "goo," grow to about 30 feet tall and take over the town, imposing rules on the grownups and taking away their guns. Bert no doubt believed that this was though-provoking commentary on the state of relations between teens and adults, and in competent hands it might have been. But bad acting, consistently inconsistent special effects and weak writing keep getting in the way of the social commentary. After all, these kids are now 30 feet tall and could easily smash the good kids like cockroaches.

So what do they do? Just stand around and talk (and, yeah, dance in slow motion) while the good kids plot, plan and eventually figure out a way to cut the bad kids back down to size.

Village of the Giants definitely lands firmly in the "so awful it's awesome" category, but I'm compelled to give credit where it's due: the opening theme song, repeated later in the film for slow-motion dancing purposes, is one of my all-time favorite instrumentals. (No, I'm not kidding.)

All this AND Toni Basil! How can you lose?

(NOTE: Bert I. wasn't quite done desecrating the works of H.G. Wells--he later made ANOTHER movie based on 'Food of the Gods,'" this time using the actual title. The results weren't that much better.)