ATTACK OF THE 50 FT. WOMAN

   Made-for-tv movie (first screened Dec 1993). Home Box Office/Warner Bros Television/Bartleby Ltd. Prod Debra Hill; dir Christopher Guest; screenplay Joseph Dougherty, based on the screenplay of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958) written by Mark Hanna; starring Daryl Hannah, Daniel Baldwin, William Windom, Frances Fisher, Christi Conaway. 89 mins. Colour.

   This is a remake of a rather dim affair from 1958 with (approximately) the same title, directed by Nathan Juran, primarily remembered for its wonderful advertising poster, and the unintentional hilarity of the story. Some feminist (see FEMINISM) criticism of the 1980s resuscitated the film as an early icon to do with the empowering of women. The possibly imaginary feminist subtext of the original is taken up with a vengeance and foregrounded in this rather one-note tale of a put-upon woman, played by Hannah (in therapy, and with a philandering husband, played by Baldwin) who, by alien intervention, grows to be fifty feet tall and gets her own back. It is a mildly amusing film, better than its original though crudely propagandizing, with Hannah positively glowing once she gets big enough, so to speak, to dominate, and to inspire other women. The film ends with a men's group therapy class including the Baldwin character, supervised by three vast women, in an alien spacecraft.