One of the silliest B-Movie Monsters ever created (right up there with the monster from The Giant Claw and the rabbits from Night of the Lepus), these critters are from a real clunker off a movie, but have some interesting quirks to them that are worth a second look.
Symbolism
The film attempted to use these monsters as icons of overpopulation, the monsters eating everything in sight before falling to consume themselves. A group turning out and consuming everything in their path before turning inward and destroying themselves—cold war metaphors be darned.
This movie was featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000, so that alone can tell you how well THAT message got through.
Mostly, they’re your standard predator, out to eat and devour the protagonists. I’d call them heroes, but all they do is stand around and drink for 90% of the movie.
Biology
All told, shrews are important and powerful carnivores in their niche, and because of their mammalian metabolism, these critters do need to eat their own weight in food daily, or die.
But that is a byproduct of their size, not any metabolic malfunction indicative to the species. So giant shrews would…well, they’d eat as much as a counterpart off similar size. The behavior I chalked up to “mutation”, which in creature that are already the size of dog and look nothing like their evolutionary ancestor, explains it about as well as “a stubbed toe” would suffice to descry be a man who has been drawn, quartered and then Julian fried when asked how he died.
Oddly enough, in prehistory, there was a large carnivorous shrew on one of the islands that would eventually form, the Miocene Deinogalerix. This animal grew to 60cm (almost 2ft) in length, a third of which was just its massive head.
A bit smaller and quite different from the monsters portrayed in the film.
These dogs with shag rugs glued on them have 4 large prominent fangs that are exaggerated into saber teeth. From research regarding Smilodon, the iconic Saber-toothed cat, such teeth would most likely be used for severing the jugular vein and ripping out the throat in one clean bite.
In the film, they just use them like knives.
Further biological mess-ups can be found in their deadliest ability. These shrews are venomous. The idea of a venomous mammal is odd to some—venom being the realm of reptiles and other ‘lower’ creatures to most people’s minds.
In fact, there are several venomous mammals. Male duckbilled platypus have venomous spurs which contain one of the most painful compounds known to the natural world. The Slow Loris, a primate, licks glands on its arms to make its bite quasi-venomous. And then there are the Cuban solenodon, the Hispanoila solenodon, the northern short tailed shrew and the Eurasian water shrew. These shrews and convergently evolved shrew-like mammals both have venomous bites. So a gigantic shrew monster, if Hollywood would have its way, could spontaneously develop the special salivary glands needed for venom.
The movie, being one of the worst ever made, decides that’s too simple a solution.
In this picture, the shrews pick up the poison from baited traps the scientists set for them, absorbing it into their saliva like they were evil dish sponges.
The killer shrews could have been very interesting monsters, but like many of the worst monsters put to screen, fell far short of its potential.
