Like a previous writer, I grew up in suburban New York (Darien, CT.) watching Chiller Theatre every Saturday night with my older brother: The Cyclops, Frankenstein’s Daughter, The Hideous Sun Demon, Plan 9 from Outer Space and this classic, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.

I love this film, because it represents a time when kids and teens were easier to please with regard to movies. I remember being facsinated by the giant alien – who looks like a bald gladiator, picking up the sheriff’s car with his hand and throwing it down on the ground. For a five year old in 1961, that was scary. All those movies on Chiller Theatre (on WPIX Ch. 11, New York)were scary, and my brother and I always looked forward to watching these movies every Saturday night at 8:30-10:00.(Yes, I was allowed to stay awake until 10pm on Saturdays, just to watch Chiller Theatre.) You have to appreciate the 50′s sci-fi mentality to enjoy this film. Special effects are cheesy, but then, who cares? This stuff s all about nostalgia and growing up in a simpler, more innocent time.

Attack of the 50 Foot Woman has the best poster of any monster movie from the 1950s, but it’s one of the cheapest sci-fi pictures I’ve ever seen. I saw it yesterday at a local theater as part of a double feature with the giant ant classic Them!, including cartoon, trailers for films like the Ronald Reagan western Law and Order (another film directed by Nathan Juran), and a 1934 Flash Gordon serial.

The special effects in Flash Gordon were better. (“Ming, did you think you could get away with spreading the Purple Death over Earth?”)

Attack of the 50 Foot Woman is the story of the woman who DIDN’T marry the monster from outer space. (I Married a Monster from Outer Space Came out the same year as Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, and I always thought Gloria Talbott would regret leaving the monster once she realized what life as a homemaker-mother with her human husband Tom Tryon would be like. “Did you love your women?” she asks the space creature she’s been sleeping with since their wedding.)

Mrs. Archer is an heiress worth a million dollars per foot. Her no-good two-timing husband Harry (“You’re a wild driver,” Harry’s floozy tells him) wants her back in the booby hatch so he can have, along with the rest of her loot, her diamond, the Star of India.

As bad as this movie is, Allison Hayes as Mrs. Archer is good at portraying a weak woman who only wants to be loved, but who grew up in too much privilege with too many people making excuses for her. (“Since Mrs. Archer pays most of the taxes around here, we humor her,” the sheriff tells his deputy when they go looking for the “satellite” she saw and the “giant” who was piloting it.)

The giant effects are really bad. The satellite giant looks like he’s wearing a costume from an old Robin Hood movie. (Even the costumes in Flash Gordon were better – - there were some Sherwood Forest-y archers on Mongo and Student Prince-type operetta uniforms that looked kinda sharp.)

The entire story can be summed in two bits of dialogue.

Mrs. Archer says, “I’ve got a feeling it’s out there, waiting for me.” Somewhere, maybe with the satellite giant, there’s a life she’s missing.

And, after she encounters the radioactive UFO and starts growing, her doctors (both men, like her husband and the butler who’s been taking care of her her whole life) find the solution to Mrs. Archer’s problem: “The chains are here.”

But she breaks out (“She’s on a rampage!”) and destroys the hotel where Harry’s been keeping his girlfriend. She takes particular pleasure in ripping up their hotel bed.

The movie ends the way it has to. (“She finally got Harry all to herself,” the pipe-smoking foreign doctor lectures us. At least he gets to the point quicker than Edmund Gwen going on at the end of Them! about a possible atomic apocalypse.)

It’s too bad this movie didn’t have at least the budget that Gene Fowler’s I Married a Monster from Outer Space did.

Like Mrs. Archer, we’ve got a feeling something’s there.