Long before he directed Apollo 13 and won an Academy Award, eleven-year-old Ron Howard mixed a batch of bright pink goo in his basement and turned a gang of teenagers into thirty-foot delinquents.

Bikini-clad giants doing the Watusi in the town square. A monster duck crashing the dance hall. A teenage uprising whose central demand is a nine o'clock curfew for grown-ups.

VILLAGE OF THE GIANTS (1965) is a teensploitation comedy from Bert I. Gordon, the low-budget giant-monster specialist nicknamed Mr. B.I.G. after his own initials. It claims to be based on H.G. Wells, who might have wanted his name back.

The casting is a Hollywood-offspring roll call, as if the budget stretched to the parents' names but not the parents: Lloyd Bridges' son Beau as the gang's leader, Mickey Rooney's son, Ann Sothern's daughter, and young Howard, then still Opie on The Andy Griffith Show.

The dancer in the cage is Toni Basil, seventeen years before "Mickey." The score is by Jack Nitzsche, the man who helped build Phil Spector's wall of sound.

The goo, for the record, was angel food cake mix dyed pink.