A Case of the Crabs

Giant crab movies are nothing new. You can go far back as 1961’s Mysterious Island for some sweet supersized crustacean action. And when you run out of ways to have mega crabs shell humans as if they were um, crab legs, then you give the title creature a new designation: Queen Crab. No word if this is a gay crab or one born of royalty.

Filmed using good old fashion stop-motion (see The Gumby Show/1956), Queen Crab is introduced via a meteor crashing into a remote quiet lake, probably loaded with giant leeches (see Attack of the Giant Leeches/1959). From there the space rock, probably thrown by God (see The Ten Commandments/1956), “awakens a centuries-old beast, who tears through a nearby town and its inhabitants who must fight for their lives and stop this Queen Crab before she can hatch an army of babies.”

An army of crab babies. Good luck finding diapers that stay on during pinch-y attacks on humanity.

Queen Crab arrives via DVD September 2015 and is reported to be loaded with extras. Wishful thinking, but I hope one of the extras is a package of drawn butter and/or cocktail sauce.

The Claw Is Family

I’ve eaten crawdads. I’ve eaten lobster. Crawdads are harder to eat as you first need to “pinch the tail and suck the head.” (Sounds like what a 1-800 escort is paid to do.) Lobster is preferable as all you have to do is crack the shell and shove the sweet meat into your mouth. OK, that didn’t sound right.

Regardless, two distantly related shellfish that deserve rental space in your tract. But what if they were movies instead of breakfast? Such is the case with Crawdaddy, an in-production sci-fi tongue-in-cheeker about a genetically altered (i.e., colossal) crawdad seeking revenge. The other, of course, is Ebirah, the giant teabag lobster that had a less-than-rewarding bout with Godzilla in the 1966 semi-classic, Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (aka, Godzilla, Ebirah, Mothra: Big Duel in the South Seas and Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster).

But the shell of it all is that Crawdaddy looks to be another SyFy Channel™ schlobster fest. All they seem to be doing is super-sizing another entree, backdropping it in a formulaic revenge agenda, and calling it a day. Ebirah, though limited in screen time, was not a digital creation (he was born in the primordial crab boil known as the ocean). Ebby really threw his claw into his performance and not let himself become just another notch on Godzilla’s victory bib. Who needed drawn butter when the action was so tasty?

Here’s what to expect with Crawdaddy…

Deep in the forest on Clear Lake, an experiment has gone terribly wrong. People are being systematically killed by an unforeseen danger. Among the survivors, including the biologist and sheriff, are three teenage ex-gang members, an Eagle Scout, a beautiful teenage blind girl, a Katrina transplant, and a hermit scientist.

Holding out at the scientist’s shack, they fight for their lives against the packs of dog-sized crawdads. The scientist reveals his involvement in creating genetically modified super-fish, which were eaten by the crawdad population at the lake, causing them to grow. It wasn’t until the last few days that they became aggressive. Just when the group thinks they’ve succeeded, the king of them all… Crawdaddy…has come to seek revenge for the killing of its spawn.

Ouch. This may be the first time a movie could give you ciguatera poisoning.