The Killer Shrews (1959) is a very low-budget yet incredibly enjoyable sci-fi / horror movie of giant, toothed shrews that infest a small island after a genetic experiment backfires and ends around a small group of people in a besieged house during a hurricane. The full movie Killer Shrews is now a free classic film and public domain film and is usually readily found in HD in streaming sites and on DVD – frequently with its production counterpart, The Giant Gila Monster.
Movie Background Table
Movie Cast Table
| Actor | Role |
|---|---|
| James Best | Thorne Sherman |
| Ingrid Goude | Ann Cragis |
| Ken Curtis | Jerry Farrell |
| Gordon McLendon | Dr. Radford Baines |
| Baruch Lumet | Dr. Marlowe Cragis |
| Henry Dupree | Rook Griswold |
| Alfredo (Alfred) De Soto | Mario |
Full Plot Summary
The movie The Killer Shrews 1959 begins with Thorne Sherman, a rugged boat captain and his first mate Rook Griswold taking supplies to a small isolated island as a hurricane is on its way. The island serves as the location where they meet an uncomfortable assembly of people which includes Dr. Marlowe Cragis, his assistant Dr. Radford Baines, Cragis daughter Ann and her fiance Jerry Farrell and a servant named Mario.
At the very beginning, there is something wrong. The islanders are courteous, but evidently wish that Thorne would get unloaded and get away before night sets in, although it is unsafe because of bad weather. When Thorne tells him that he and Rook will probably need to ride out the storm, the former agrees to a proposal to visit the hilltop compound to the point where Rook remains on the boat.
In the evening, sitting at the cocktails at the house, weird howls are heard whanging over the island. Cragis later unveils the truth, which is that he has been testing shrews on, tiny and voracious mammals, as research subjects in an experimental radical serum project aimed at reducing human beings to half their size. He believes that small people would consume less, alleviating the scarcity of food in the future on an over-populated earth.
However, the tests were disastrously unsuccessful. Rather than shrink, the work of Cragis resulted in mutant giant shrews, or dog-sized, and extremely fast, with a poisonous bite. Some of them have run out of the lab and are now roaming through the wild areas of the island to their fill, becoming heavier and hungrier day by day. The scientists and their friends are safe in the compound and block themselves in every night in hopes that the shrews will not break into the compound before they can think of a solution.
In the meantime Rook keeps watch of the boat at the beach. When the storm intensifies and he is alone at night, the shrews attack and kill him, and this we see as dogs dressed in shaggy costumes with snarling puppet heads having overly large fangs. His death is found out later and Thorne is left without an escape route out of the island.
A love triangle is created back at the home. Thorne and Ann start falling in love with each other, and it makes Jerry bitterly jealous, as Thorne is competent in the crisis they are going through, as well as Ann is obviously attractive. The more dangerous it becomes, the more Jerry drinks and becomes more belligerent.
The shrews, which have preyed out all the smaller animals on the island, are now in great need of a new victim. They tap at the fortifications of the compound, digging and gnashing doors and walls. Thorne and Mario descend to check what is going on when they finally break through a weak point in the basement. Instead, they fight a huge shrew; Thorne is unable to shoot it and kill it, and instead he bites Mario. The other characters come in but Mario dies soon after, Dr. Baines is able to inspect the body and finds out that saliva of the shrew is highly toxic and fatal with a neurotoxin.
Not long after, another rat intrudes and kills Baines mid-working, even lowering the scientific choices and morale of the group. The rest of the individuals, Thorne, Ann, Jerry, Cragis, hear the shrews gnashing through the wooden walls in the upper part of the house. It makes it clear that the house will not hold till the morning.
Thorne suggests an adventure: they are going to abandon the betrayal house and attempt to get to his boat with the veils of improvised armour. With empty oil drums, metal panels, and rope, they construct a crude segmented shell large enough to accommodate three of them with intent to walk together in duck-walk fashion out of the house to the shoreline with the armor smacking off shrew bites. The design is based on cooperation and trust; whoever violates the formation puts them all in danger.
Jerry is obstinate and still holding on to his ego and therefore, at first, does not want to go as he thinks he can either fight off the shrews or just ride the night through by his own. Thorne, Ann and Cragis lock themselves in the drum armor and wuffle out into storm. Shrews attack them, stinging the metal, but failing to make any impression, and the three gradually advance to the shore.
It is only too late to realise the fact that individualism is death sentence here, and Jerry reforms his mind and runs after the group unprotected. The killer shrews attack him and pull him away; he is seemingly cut to pieces off-screen (later retconced as a survivor in the 2012 follow-up), though. His demise highlights the stark message of the movie, that one needs to work as a team in order to survive.
The three others who survived get to the waterline, leave the ruined armor behind and row out through the surf to the boat in which Thorne was moored. They make a boarding and leave the burning, overrun island and its mutant residents behind them, as the storm sets in. The concluding narration is that although this outbreak has been contained, there are more irresponsible experiments that would open the same horrors in other places.
Genre and Key Themes
The Killer Shrews is a combination of science fiction horror and the siege survival thriller, all in the traditional 1950s creature-feature manner.
Key themes include:
Unintended consequences and scientific hubris.
The idealistic hope of Dr. Cragis to feed the world by reducing the size of humans only results in giant predators, and it recalls many of the warning stories of the atomic age of playing around with nature.
Overpopulation anxiety
The premise specifically alludes to the concerns of a lack of food supply in the world to keep up with an ever-increasing population, an often discussed theme of mid-20th-century science fiction.
Cooperation vs. selfishness
That the oil-drum escape scheme is ever effective is due to the fact that Thorne, Ann and Cragis literally chain themselves together in one shell; Jerry refuses to cooperate and thus condemns himself to death.
Constrained space tension of siege.
The movie is set in one location and the surrounding area and the characters are hearing the walls being gnashed away, yet another very basic yet successful claustrophobic suspense device.
Low‑budget ingenuity
The shrews (also notoriously represented by dogs in costume and close-up shots of puppet heads) also reflect the ingenuity (and constraints) of local, low-budget monster-filmmaking.
The Killer Shrews (1959) Full Movie Watch and Download
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Movie Review
The film The Killer Shrews 1959 has been often criticized because of its creature effects, however, it can also be watched with a sense of genuine enjoyment due to its pace and atmosphere and remarkably good structure. It is frequently described by modern critics as even more than it should be, considering its micro-budget and the fame of the shrew suits.
James Best performs superbly as Thorne Sherman and portrays him as a no-nonsense businessperson who does not grandstand to be in authority. Ingrid Goude makes good Ann, and Ken Curtis (soon to be the Festus on Gunsmoke) plays on the insecurity and cowardice of Jerry. It gives Baruch Lumet (father of director Sidney Lumet) some seriousness as Dr. Cragis.
Director Ray Kellogg maintains the flow of the film, never elongating a scene too much. A minor but authentic tension is created by the storm, the wailing, the constant assaults on the house, and the bleak deaths of the secondary characters. The sequence involving the oil-drum armor is creative enough to be frequently singled out as one of the more memorable or even ingenious of ideas in the film.
The constraints, on the other hand, are self-evident. The ridiculousness of the look of the shrews, dogs wearing shaggy costumes and with fake close-ups, became a joke of its own after the film was riffed on the fourth season of Mystery Science Theater 3000. The dialogue is sometimes pallid and most of the first half is talky, most of it taking place in the living room of the island house. To certain audiences, this slow-drawn is airy; to some, it is an air-paddling.
Challenges notwithstanding (or despite) these vices, The Killer Shrews full movie has lived on as a cult classic. It led to a sequel, Return of the Killer Shrews (2012), about the same story again, but with James Best, who doubled down on the camp. Being a public domain film and free classic, it has been preserved, tinted, riffed, re-created in HD, and distributed on multiple platforms, so it is probably one of the simplest monster films of the 1950s to sample.
Movie Tags
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