THE 30 FOOT BRIDE OF CANDY ROCK

Lou Costello and Dorothy Provine

THE 30 FOOT BRIDE OF CANDY ROCK (1959). Director: Sidney Miller.

So somebody got the idea of doing a spoof of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (which came out over a year before this film did), a movie which was already amusing and in fact has a lot more laughs than this atrocious "comedy." It may have seemed a good idea to put Lou Costello in it (appearing without his usual partner, Bud Abbott), but the little guy has such poor material that there's nothing he can do to save it. 

Costello [Blaze of Glory] plays Artie Pinsetter, a small-town junk man and part-time inventor. After an argument, his girlfriend Emily (Dorothy Provine) runs into a cavern and the next thing they know she's grown into a giant. (After taking a shower she grows even larger, about fifty feet or more.) The Army thinks she's a giantess from Mars and her uncle (Gale Gordon), who's running for governor, just wants her to disappear. (He insists that she and Artie get married because he misunderstood what Artie meant when he said his niece had gotten "bigger.") Although Provine could play the blond bimbo with the best of them, in this she sort of plays it straight, which doesn't work at all. The movie has approximately five mild chuckles, although the expected gag at the end is funny. To make matters worse, Gale Gordon -- who could be very clever at times but is not amusing in this -- stinks up the production even more. 

Verdict: This is an effort to sit through. *1/2.