Runtime: 69 (heh) minutes
Directed by: Ray Kellogg
Starring: James Best, Ingrid Goude, Ken Curtis, Baruch Lumet, Gordon McLendon
From: Hollywood Pictures Corporation
It was time for a silly sci-fi picture from the late 50’s. Many will know it from its public domain status and appearance during the 4th season of MST3K. I’ve always laughed that it featured Roscoe P. Coltrane from The Dukes of Hazzard (James Best), along with the practical decision to dress dogs up as the titular mole-like mammals.
There’s no time wasted in boat captain Best and his Black sidekick Judge Henry Dupree delivering supplies to a remote island but a hurricane prevents their leaving. Those temporarily on the island are a few, including a scientist who… wants to shrink humans as a method to combat overpopulation. I laughed because that was not only a plot point in the 1936 Tod Browning movie The Devil-Doll, there are now multiple movies I know of which remind me of the flop film Downsizing. He experiments on shrews; of course it goes wrong and become dog-sized. To the movie’s credit, they were scientifically accurate in proclaiming that shrews in general have a voracious appetite.
It's a low-budget B-movie mainly filmed in a house setting that people don’t like due to how “boring” this tale was. I was never in a state of torpor while viewing it, personally; the human drama was alright. Dogs as giant shews notwithstanding, at least they make a distinctive noise that could be considered unnerving. I wasn’t bored by the limited setting or the characters stuck w/ each other during a hurricane. There were things that made me laugh: the lone woman character is a scientist’s daughter; he has an American accent, she a Swedish accent due to her being played by Swedish beauty pageant contestant Ingrid Goude. That discrepancy is never explained.
Thankfully the movie is not terrible without the aid of MST3K; it was filmed back-to-back with The Giant Gila Monster, a picture that perhaps I was a bit harsh on. After all, I still laugh that Gila featured rebel teenagers who get along with the cops-and it’s funny that it featured a former French beauty pageant contestant who is randomly in rural Texas. I imagine Shrews and Gila made for a fine double feature at the drive-in (this was literally the market they made the films for) for a teenage audience… at least those who weren’t making out in the backseat!
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