So I was browsing through the TV guide when I came upon a listing for ATTACK OF THE 50 FT WOMAN. Could this be that 50's science-fiction film that I've always been meaning to see but never got the chance? Well, turns out it was an HBO made-for-TV remake and, having just seen it, I can almost guarentee that I'll never watch it again...
The main problem with it is that the film is way too short on action and heavy on uninteresting soap-opera rubbish. Daryl Hannah does what she can with the material but I never at once felt sorry for the her, which is what the script tried to keep hammering in. In fact, for the first half of the film, we only get two brief glimpses of a flying saucers (both not very impressive... I still prefer Ed Wood's paper plates on strings). Finally, when Hannah's character starts growing, the narrative is given a brief jolt, but not enough to make it that interesting... It's basically just more of the same old but with Hannah getting increasingly bigger.
When the action finally does kick in near the end, it's not particuarly satisfying... I'm not sure how this compares to the 50s original but I doubt it's as ineptly staged and dull as this remake... Despite the title, the 50-foot woman here never really does any attacking... she just strolls down the street and we get a bunch of close-ups of people screaming and running around blindly... I'm not expecting her to act like Godzilla and smash the place up (although that would have been appreciated) but the way that these climactic scenes were handled were pretty disappointing. There's also a brief encounter with a pair of helicopters that produces similarly mundane results... Perhaps the best scene in the movie is when Hannah peers over a Drive-in movie theater where they're showing clips from the original ATTACK OF THE 50 FOOT WOMAN... It's a shame that I wasn't watching that one instead...
And that's the real problem with this film... There's nothing really all that satisfying about it, except for the novelty of watching a 50-foot tall scantily clad woman cause a curiously restrained amount of havoc, if you could even call it that... Daniel "the forgotten" Baldwin is fairly amusing as the slime-ball husband, but that's about it. Right before the credits at the end of the film, we get a few brief paragraphs on the characters and what happened to them after the film ended... The fact that I could care less about what was written there speaks worlds about my indifference to this film...