BEFORE: This is last film before I go on break AGAIN - the three weeks off in September without watching a movie seemed much too long, and now I'm out for another week. We're flying to Dallas later today to hit the last day of the Texas State Fair, see our first rodeo and visit Southfork Ranch, then we're driving to Little Rock, Memphis and Nashville on a BBQ Crawl. This is a real thing, I've watched a show called "BBQ Crawl" and enjoyed it, but now it's time to live it. And I'm guessing there's a reason why it's called a crawl and not a "BBQ Sprint" or "BBQ Trot".
Meanwhile my Watchlist has been slowly growing, I kept it at 135 for a good long time, but taking too much time off makes it balloon up again - it's 145 now, and I'm not done recording all of the Dracula movies that TCM's running this month - plus I've got about 15 more current movies that I need to record before cable stops running them, so I think it will be up at 150 really soon. I'm going to program as few as possible to record while I'm away, because I can't have the DVR filling up while I'm not home. I'll have to push as many of them as possible into November, when at least I'll be watching films again and trying to make some bit of progress before the year ends.
Bing Russell carries over from "Tarantula" where he played "Deputized Townsman", tonight he moves a step up to "State Trooper at Train & Bus Wrecks", whatever that means.
THE PLOT: A giant prehistoric praying mantis, recently freed from the Arctic ice, voraciously preys on American military and works its way south.
AFTER: You can tell a film was made during the Cold War when it opens with a 3-minute segment about the line of radar stations in Canada that protected the U.S. from a Soviet missile strike, which was called the D.E.W. Line (Distant Early Warning). Only then could the audiences relax for 80 minutes and enjoy the show, after being reassured that an atomic bomb would not interrupt their big night out at the movies. What big balls we had back in the 1950's, placing our radar stations all over Canada like we owned the place - Canada, you were way too nice. If I were in charge of Canada in the 1950's, I would have said, "Sorrey, eh, you can't put your radar stations on our land. If you get blown up by Russia we're going to wait a few years for the radiation to die down, then we can move down south into your land and finally get away from all this snow, eh?"
There's a connection here to "Creature From the Black Lagoon", which is a belief that it could be possible for prehistoric creatures to survive over the millennia, either by failing to evolve or by getting stuck in the ice, and then manifest in the present day to attack humans. It seems the horror filmmakers in the 1950's were starting to figure out how evolution worked, and began using that knowledge to scare the moviegoers. Like a fly stuck in amber, the giant mantis here got frozen in an ice floe or something many eons ago, and released by a volcano. OK, two things, that volcano is in the South Seas, how does that melt the ice in the Arctic? People didn't know about "global warming" back then, so there's a B.S. line about how "every action has an equal and opposite reaction". That may be true, but thousand of miles away? That's not how weather works. Secondly, how the heck did the giant mantis get up in the Arctic in the first place, in order to get frozen?
Then we've got to deal with the very suspect distinction that the mantis is the "deadliest" of all creatures. Why, just because the females eat their mates? I guess maybe if you count all the aphids that a mantis eats over the course of its life, probably thousands, but who gives a crap about aphids? We're talking about being deadly from a human point of view, so I'm not buying it. No tiny mantis ever killed a human, I'm willing to bet - meanwhile, more humans die from diseases transmitted by mosquitoes each year than from shark attacks. (725,000 deaths from mosquito bites vs 10 killed by sharks) Even the lowly SNAIL is responsible for about 10,000 human deaths each year. So take that, sharks. Hippos even beat sharks 50-1 (500 vs. 10) but the second deadliest animal is apparently man himself, responsible for 475,000 human deaths each year.
Back to the giant mantis - which does seem to be trying to skew the statistics, since this one eats human flesh. And it knocks down jet fighter planes, which were the things that took down "Tarantula" last night. And when the Air Force is helpless, the U.S. calls in the next line of defense, which is a paleontologist and a museum magazine editor. (Wait, what?) They're able to figure out just what it is that's eating all the soldiers, even though they haven't seen it up close yet. Too bad they weren't in time to save that Eskimo village.
Romance blooms between Joe, the commanding officer at one of those Northern radar stations (and later he's a renegade fighter pilot, apparently) and Marge, the editor of that museum magazine. Ah, but what chance do two crazy kids have in this world when there's a giant mantis lurking about? Can their love survive a giant insect that wants to eat us all? (Might as well go for it, Marge, since your paleontologist friend apparently wasn't picking up on any of your signals...)
After climbing the Washington Monument, the mantis gets wounded in a battle with the Air Force (Joe's in one of those planes, apparently, taking matters into his own hands) and heads for the "Manhattan Tunnel" between NYC and New Jersey. They don't say whether it was the Lincoln Tunnel or the Holland Tunnel, but it doesn't matter, we all know nothing can survive in either one for very long. If you can't "kill it with fire", by all means, try car exhaust fumes.
This is the third and final of my "giant bug" films for this year, after "Them!" and "Tarantula". When I get back from vacation next Sunday, I'll have just three films to go, and three days left in October to watch them. No more bugs, only giant lizards left on the docket.
Also starring Craig Stevens (last seen in "Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"), William Hopper (last seen in "Rebel Without a Cause"), Alix Talton (last seen in "The Man Who Knew Too Much" (1956)), Donald Randolph (last seen in "The Caddy"), Pat Conway, Florenz Ames, Paul Smith (last seen in "Funny Face"), Phil Harvey (last seen in "Touch of Evil"), Floyd Simmons, Paul Campbell, Helen Jay.
RATING: 3 out of 10 civilian observers
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