Beginning of the End Movie Review

From the opening shot of a couple necking in a convertible on lovers’ lane to the tinny over-wrought musical score to the stock footage of soldiers and tanks, this is the archetypal 1950s big-bug B-movie. Huge, radiation-spawned locusts attack Chicago. Peter Graves springs into action and saves the day. Easily the best giant grasshopper film ever made, it's good for giggles but little more. Graves (It Conquered the World), Morris Ankrum (Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers), and even Peggy Castle (Target Earth) were all veterans of cheap sci-fi battles for world domination. The ad campaign stressed the fact that they used “real” grasshoppers in the movie, as opposed to that “phony” stop-motion stuff. Bert I. Gordon would move on to more oversized bugs with The Spider, followed by other BIG productions.

1957 73m/B Peggy Castle, Peter Graves, Morris Ankrum, Richard Benedict, James Seay; D: Bert I. Gordon; W: Fred Freiberger, Lester Gorn; C: Jack Marta. VHS NO