The Killer Shrews (1959)

So much average

How sad is this?

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

I saw this film featured on the hit riffing show, Mystery Science Theater 3000. From the looks of it, the film did manage to turn a bit of a profit back in the day as it cost like 200,000 to make and netted over one million dollars. Nothing like today, but back then it was probably considered a rather good success. The film certainly has its moments; unfortunately, most of the moments occur during the last portion of the film. Most of the film is just kind of boring as there are lots of explaining scenes, scenes where people are drinking, scenes where alliances are made and did I mention drinking? So, while the last ten or so minutes of the film are pretty decent, the film as a whole is a bit of a bore. The film features monsters which look to be a mixture of puppets for close up scenes and dogs wearing very bad looking costumes in scenes where the monsters are shown to be running after their prey. Of course, as bad as it looks, you are not going to be seeing much of the monsters in this one anyways for most of the film, but you are going to see a lot of the bar in it.The story has a guy and his assistant delivering supplies to an island. Too bad, there is a storm coming so they have to prepare their boat for the oncoming hurricane. For reasons unknown, everyone on the island is rather jumpy. A few drinks later and it is let out that the experiments that the group has been doing on the island have escaped and now run amok! What are they? As the title says, killer shrews! They are giant sized shrews and they are very hungry! The source of food on the island is dwindling so now these monsters turn their attentions on the group of people stranded within a house.This made for an okay episode of MST3K. The film does start out kind of slowly though, so there is a lot of riffs about the amount of alcohol the main characters consume. There are some good jokes to be had though as they make the best of the slow start. This film is just another in a long line of films they riffed about giant animals going on the attack.So the film is not that good for the most part, but it does feature some decent content. I liked how they finally figured a way to get away from the giant shrews by using the drums. This made me think of another film where something similar was done. It was set in Africa and it had lions going crazy, though they were not mutants or anything. The family made some sort of thing to walk through the lions and get to their cars. I think giving the shrews poisonous bites was a bit overkill as they already had numbers so making them venomous was a bit much. It made their escape less believable as it look like the shrews should have easily gotten a head under the makeshift device and bite at least one of them! Still, it was the best scene in a movie where the action sequences was few and far between.

This is an awful horror film. It is, well, laughable. I guess if it doesn't scare you then it's sure to get a few laughs out of you - it certainly did me.The film started out irking me due to the fact that the "Captain" was unworried about his first mate out in a hurricane alone. This fact alone was enough for me to dislike the film right off the bat! Any real captain would have either went back out to weather the storm with his first mate or tried to see if the first mate could stay in the home and have dinner as well.As the film progressed I was somewhat bored and somewhat entertained at the nonsense on the screen. Towards the climax of the film and ending I got a few laughs out of the movie. The welded barrels was enough to get me giggling.If everyone in this film was eaten by the shews it would have been alright by me - that is how awful this film is. But I did get some giggles out of it so I will have to rate this film a big "4".4/10

I got this movie from the 100 pack at Wal Mart. once I found out who was in it I just had to jump right in,, James Best.. Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrain. apparently on an island somewhere, overpopulation has become a real problem, and these Giant Killer Shrews are taking over the population and the island. just imagine yourself on an island like that where you are being over run by these huge gigantic shrews, I thought James Best did a wonderful job in this.. he was very funny, and his acting was also pretty good,, I guess back in the late 50's you could say that the undertone to this movie was a warning about overpopulation and what it will mean in the future if we as humans try to take over a certain land mass or area... very decent film from the 50's that isn't Oscar material, but not bad either,, I would recommend it even if I never heard of James Best.

Of course this wasn't a master piece, it was a b movie. But as far as b movies go, it was entertaining, it was relatively clever, and I enjoyed the acting, again not the greatest acting ever, but I enjoyed it. The shrews were just dogs in a costume, but it's better than the cgi sequel return of the killer shrews. Some down sides of the film is because the effects aren't great, almost every b movie cliché has been followed, such as the Black man dying first, and the jerk in the film dies off around the end. This would be a great movie to show at horror themes parties, watching a movie during Halloween. I have given it the title of the best b movie I have seen. Give it a watch.