As someone who is from Maryland, I have a special relationship with crabs. When cooked and spiced correctly there is nothing quite as delicious as blue crabs from the Chesapeake Bay. Seeing as how I have this love — no, near religious devotion to these creatures — you can imagine the shock I experienced when someone had turned the crab into a movie villain. It was terrible. What monster could do such a thing? But then reality set in and I came to my senses and I needed to find out more. Like where did this movie come from? Is it any good? Most importantly, how will it taste with melted butter?
Thankfully, the answers to those questions were not hard to find. Queen Crab is from Wild Eye Releasing, who are veritable specialists in crazy cinema. The director is Brett Piper, who made A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell and Muckman. I haven’t seen those films, but after just typing those titles out I sure as hell want to now.
The story to Queen Crab is simple in monster movie fashion. Melissa Webber (Michelle Simone Miller) is a young girl who just happens to befriend a freshwater crab. Her father is a scientist working on a serum that makes food grow exponentially larger and her mother is a housewife that, of course, thinks what her husband is doing is absurd. When a horrible accident kills her parents the Sheriff (Ken Van Sant) takes care of her. Flash forward to when she’s all grown things start to get real crazy. She’s been hiding the crab from the town for years but things all go to hell when the crab starts having babies and people start dying.
Of course, this being a monster movie the crab is the star of the show, but what makes this even more special is that the crab is actually made with stop motion animation. This is fantastic! Some of my favorite movies from my childhood were films like THEM! (1954) and Tarantula (1955), films whose hook was a giant creature and the need to blow it the hell up. This film slips right in with the stop motion classics and is just as fun.
The movie also shines with the comedic moments that had me laughing out loud and the delightful deaths that punctuate the plot points. Those moments are inventive, fun, and all the more impressive when you consider that the move makers, according to IMDB, only had $75,000 to play with. I don’t think I’d be able to renovate the house I live in on that budget but these filmmakers came up with something special right here.
So if you are a horror addict that likes movies like Sharknado 3 or any of the monster movie classics you should give this a shot. It’ll put a smile on your face and you’ll be helping to keep stop motion alive. Now where is the melted butter?
Queen Crab is going to be released on VOD and DVD on September 29th.
Derek Scarzella is a lone wolf running through the night with a heart full of dynamite and a limitless passion for Action movies and all things awesome. ‘Nuff said.