Review of Village of the Giants

What's the first thing to do when you and seven other friends crash your car into a road block and you're stuck in the mud? Well, you DANCE! What's your first reaction when you're attending a rock concert and all of a sudden two gigantically over-sized ducks come waddling in? You start DANCING, of course. What's the very first thing you must accomplish when you and your friends grew up to a length of 30ft. after consuming a gooey unidentified substance? Right again, you must DANCE! I don't think the legendary bad movie director Bert I. Gordon (BIG, for his friends) ever intended to make a loyal adaptation of H.G. Well's novel "Food of the Gods", he merely just wanted to make a light-headed and 60's spirit-capturing musical about the earliest Rock 'n Roll generations. "Village of the Giants" features an intolerably high amount of pointless padding sequences that simply show teenagers – whether 30ft tall or not – singing and dancing to Jack Nitzsche's (admittedly catchy) music and that's it. Thank God the film never at one point attempts to be a real scary and unsettling Sci-Fi movie, because that would have been really pathetic with all the lousy acting performances, tacky effects and the virtually non-existing screenplay. The annoying former child star Ron Howard portrays the nerdy kid-inventor Genius and accidentally discovers a substance that causes living creatures to grow to enormous proportions. A gang of naughty, outer town kids manage to steal a big slice of goo because they're sick and tired of being bossed around by adults. The adults probably just righteously stated they should waste less time on dancing and get a job! The goody-two-shoes teenagers in town fight (and go-go dance) back, though! What a totally demented movie this is. I wonder if Beau Bridges would like to be reminded of his role in this film as the nagging and totally uncharismatic leader of the bad pack. Presumably not… And neither would Toni Basil and Ron Howard. However, it must be interesting to see an X-rated version of this film, since all of the girls are quite beautiful (particularly Joy Harmon) and literally bursting out of garments as they feed on the substance. "Village of the Giants" is never suspenseful or interesting, with the exception of one notably engaging gargantuan tarantula scene, and manages to be quite boring despite the short running time. Jack Nitzsche's theme music was obviously brilliant, because no less than Quentin Tarantino borrowed the song "The Last Race" for his own recent grindhouse movie "Death Proof". Worth a peek in case you're a fan of horribly bad low-budget 60's stuff or in case you have a strange & inexplicable admiration for director/writer Bert I. Gordon, like I have.