Island Claws (1980) - If you do spot a crab... you must have better eyesight than me

I always feel bad when I rip on a B-movie.  Most of the films in my DVD collection involve daft rubbery monsters and screaming victims.  It's safe to say I don't consider myself to have a 'high bar' in terms of the movies I like and, as long as they can entertain me in one way or another, then I'm happy.

'Island Claws' is about a swarm of killer crabs on an island.  Now, I've seen plenty of normal animals, always mutated to giant levels, stalking various hapless residents.  So, when that's your kind of thing, killer crabs actually sound like fun.

Only there's no actual kills for roughly the first forty-five minutes and, I know the production budget isn't huge, but you'll see where it's been spent on when it comes to our clawed antagonists.  There's lots of them.  Some footage of real crabs has been interwoven with the anamatronic crabs created just for this.  And the puppet crabs look good.  In other words the look like regular crabs.  But I was kind of hoping for more.  Okay, so in the final act we got a - long overdue - giant crab, but there could have been at least one who shoots laser beams from his eye stalks, or something.  Did I expect too much?

So the side-crawlers aren't up to much, but I guess they're a little more interesting than the humans who run around in the dark trying not to get their toes pinched by these clawed menaces.

In short, not much happens.  Yes, it's a B-movie, so most of us don't expect Oscar-worthy performances, but, for all its eighties cheesiness, it's just not that fun to watch.  I know remakes are often looked down on, but this is the rare occasion where I'd actually like to see one.  Killer crabs is a good - but completely - silly, idea.  So if it was done with a slightly higher budget and a script which knows it's tongue-in-cheek then you could actually be left with something that's quite fun.

4/10 You can watch this film while you're doing the ironing (you'll still get the general gist of it)