Film review – Attack of the 50 Foot Camgirl

My notes on Attack of the 50 Foot Camgirl

The Allison Hayes vehicle Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958) – one of the very few authentic camp classic 1950s s-f films – was remade in 1993 with Darryl Hannah as a broad comedy.  The best and most surprisingly moving reinvention of the 50 Foot Woman was in Monsters vs Aliens, which offered some redemption for one of the most derided and mocked movie mutants.  It has also been spun out into Attack of the 50 Foot Cheerleader and Attack of the 50 Foot Centerfold and now gets worked over again for a new generation of female stereotype, with a script by Kent Roudebush (of Zombie Strippers and various Evil Bong movies) and direction from Jim Wynorski, who’s been very busy if seldom distinguished in making a hundred or so movies since The Lost Empire in 1984.

Made for the current iteration of Charles Band’s Full Moon Empire and barely getting past the sixty minute mark by opening with the climax then telling the story in flashback and delivering the same footage again, this has a few okayish elements – nice miniature sets for the cam-girl giants to flounder around in and pastiche music by effects man Chuck Cirino (augmented by authentic library tracks).  Maybe one and a half jokes land, though the performances display the proper mix of woodenness and attack found in 1950s drive-in fare … Christine Nguyen, for instance, is kind of terrible in the Yvette Vickers role, but still manages to steal most of the scenes she’s in.

Cam-girl Beverly Wood (Ivy Smith) is a domineering shrew – ‘hashtag big bitch’ is said as the hashtag appears on screen and, yes, this is a film that thinks saying ‘hashtag’ out loud is automatically funny – but her manager-photographer Bradley (Eli Cirino) is a scheming creep and her p.a. Fuschia (Nguyen) is seducing him in order to All About Eve herself into a cam-girl career.  Three annoying scientists have developed super-foods (played by groceries) that regenerate and Beverly insists on eating an untested hot-dog weiner, which makes her grow and rush through the story of the old movie with the added fillip that the rival grows too and we get a kaiju catfight in toytown at the end (not a spoiler – we get it at the beginning too).

Wynorski mostly uses low camera angles, miniature sets and perspective tricks to make the women seem giant.  Sadly, one thing that this tease of a movie reveals is that low angles are exceptionally unflattering to starlets, making them look dumpy and ungainly rather than glamazon (no fifty-foot woman has matched the poster image from the first film, though Hayes came close).  There’s a very brief, very pointless no-sex make-out scene with Smith and chief mad scientist Lisa London (who’s been doing this stuff since H.O.T.S. in 1979).