User Reviews

***** SPOILER WARNING *****

I have a special fondness for this film because (a) it and I are of the same vintage, and (b) it's still as scary and silly as it was when I first saw it at about age 10. Marvel at the motherlode of movie cliches! Thrill to the pseudo-newsreel coverage of brave new radars! See Eskimos madly paddling their canoes! See macho stock footage of the brave U.S. Air Force! See the beautiful woman turn "grown" men into drooling fools! See the beautiful women shriek their pretty heads off! See bewildered brass battle the bodacious bug! See styrofoam insect body parts! Hear the scary music and the scary insect drone! Watch the big bug defy the silly humans and their futile weapons! Watch the obligatory shallow romance materialize out of nowhere! Watch the flat acting that, yes, you *could* have done better!

Despite its pervasive cheesiness, previous reviewers are right: The Deadly Mantis is really too good for MST3K. Uninvite Joel and the bots when you watch this one. The story holds together, and shows 1950s American fears and bravado as well as most productions of the day. The mantis is big enough -- and yes, deadly enough -- to scare ya real good. (They scare me plenty when they're normal size.) But in the end, when it's trapped and dying, you can still muster some pity for a creature that, after all, was only trying to survive.

This is no classic. It *is* a piece of cheese. But by God, it's lovable cheese.

Half the movie is stock military footage of jets being scrambled, anti-aircraft guns being fired, and so forth. There's even a little lecture, with graphic, about the air-defense radar and jet base installations guarding us from enemy attack.

The bug is sort of goofy. In flying shots, it seems immobile except for blurred wings. It does rock forward and back slightly as it flies. You can almost imagine it mumbling contentedly to itself, "Doop-de-doop-de-doop," as it moves through the air without any exertion.

The acting, direction, writing--what can you say? With creature features you're not talking Citizen Kane, but even so this movie is pretty bad.

As in so many creature features, our hero follows the big bug every step of the way, from discovery to combat to alerting the public to leading the final attack in the "Manhattan Tunnel." He sure gets around! Also, by being in so many places in such a short time and being multi-skilled to boot, it eliminates need to pay more actors.

Unlike the grand-daddy of all big bug movies, Them, this movie does not build a story about the bug acting the way a bug should, only bigger. The mantis roars like a maddened lion, for example. In Them, the writing very cleverly includes real details about ant behavior and then shows it taking place, much to everyone's horror.

The best scene is in the tunnel at the end of the movie, as the big bug gasps in its death throes. Suddenly you feel sorry for the guy. Possibly it's the only real drama in the picture.

Something strange is happening in remote areas of the Arctic. An Air Force weather station is found wrecked, its occupants missing. An Eskimo village is destroyed. A fishing vessel disappears. Curious spoors are found in the snow. A four-foot piece of a living organism is found near a destroyed airplane. The piece looks like half of the claw of a giant Alaskan crab. The military (Craig Stevens as an Air Force officer) and its experts are baffled. A distinguished scientist (William Hopper) and his pretty assistant (Alix Taltan) are called in from New York. Hopper deduces from this flimsy evidence that they are dealing with a monstrous praying mantis. He's right. The pretty assistant happens to look out the window of the office and sees the hideous face with its bulging eyeballs staring in at her. She drops what she's carrying, claps her hands to her cheeks, and screams in horror.

The mantis begins flying South along the Gulf Stream, pausing now and again to attack major population centers like Washington and New York to overturn buses and eat people. Military weapons don't affect it much but finally Stevens crashes into it in his jet fighter and mortally damages the beast, which comes to earth and occupies the "Manhattan Tunnel" linking New York and New Jersey.

Stevens, having survived the collision, leads his team into the tunnel and kills the big bug with "3RG mines" despite its fierce appearance, threatening behavior, and earth-shattering roars. Stevens and Taltan kiss in front of the body while Hopper chuckles and takes their picture.

Ho hum.

Like the deadly mantis itself, the formula by this time was panting and gasping for air, flopping around, seeking as its prey not human beings but anything at all in the way of a fresh or original idea. As it is, they overlooked one cliché. Hopper should have hurriedly had to invent a Super Duper DDT that, alone, could defeat the insect. That's what the 3RG mines should have been filled with, rather than ordinary explosive.

The model work is pretty good, considering what the budget must have been. Not much money could have been spent on anything else because everything else is pretty routine. Craig Stevens is bland, a face and style made for a TV series. William Hopper looks right -- tall and silver haired -- but his instrument has only one note. The pretty assistant is rather plain, considering her role. The part calls for Joan Weldon or Laurie Nelson. They couldn't act either but carried with them slight but distinct intimations of molestibility. Anything would have helped this fagged-out movie.

I wish the deadly mantis hadn't roared so loudly and so often because you can't roar -- you can't even whisper -- if you don't have lungs. I didn't mind, though, when the monster met its demise in the tunnel. A praying mantis is a graceful insect in its own spindly way and it's great to have them in the garden because they eat caterpillars and whatnot. But when you get right down to it, they aren't really very appealing. The male mantis is smaller and weaker than the female, as in humans, and when the couple are just about through copulating, the female bites the head off the male, also as in humans. But at least human males know when to stop. The male mantis keeps on copulating for several minutes even though he is now without a head. We humans don't have mindless males copulating with goal-driven females. Do we?

Thirty per cent of this movie appears to be the prototype for the Map Channel. You see a giant map for about ten minutes, then they unleash the stock footage big time while droning(droning, get it?)on about radar. Apparently there's a lot of radar stations in the far north, protecting North America's borders from attacks by deadly polar bears. The bears never show up, but a giant Mantis does. It was frozen in the ice for over a million years or so, until it was released by an earthquake somewhere else in the world(yeah, right. For my money, it was released by global warming). It is a huge prehistoric insect, and it needs lots of food. Since there aren't any cows in the frozen north, it decides to feast on the most bovine-like creatures it can find up there. I.E., human beings. It starts attacking radar stations, probably because the humming from the radar dishes was getting on its nerves.

Enter Col. Joe Parkman, the resident smarmy guy of the film. He's investigating a plane that went down, and is puzzled why there are no bodies in the wreckage. The only thing he finds is one of the claws of the Mantis. Apparently it decided to trim its nails while it was snacking on the plane's crew. Parkman takes the claw tip back with him to be analyzed by a thousand year old scientist.

Grandpa scientist can't make heads or tails of the claw, mostly because he's missed his naps so his mind isn't functioning too well. So he calls in a smug paleontologist played by the guy who was the P.I. in Perry Mason. He and his friend, a transvestite photographer, fly north because he's decided that the claw must have come from a Praying Mantis. Just one the size of a commuter train.

It's Luke warm love at first sight when Col.Parkman first sets eyes on the she-male photographer. The men at the base, obviously having been deprived for many years, think she's the hottest thing to come along since Granny Clampett. Smug science guy and smarmy soldier guy start working together to track the path of the Mantis, which has devastated some stock footage of an Eskimo village. It comes to the base looking for an after dinner snack, and crushes some cheap sets quite effectively. Then it flies south and disappears.

Now comes the tense hours when the civilian ground observer core are called on to sweep the skies looking for anything large flying overhead. I doubt that in reality they would have been told that they were looking for a giant flying mantis that eats human beings, since that would haver caused a panic. Probably they were told to look for a giant 727 that was painted green and hummed because its engine was out of tune.

Col. Parkman goes up in a plane to try to shoot the Mantis down, and botches the mission. The Mantis lands in New York City, probably because it wanted to take in a show on Broadway or visit Sex World in Times Square. The army corners it in the Tunnel, and Parkman and his men don stupid suits that they borrowed from the Orkin Man to go in and try to blow the Mantis up. Success! Well, almost, since the Mantis is still twitching enough that it almost kills the mannish Eve Arden photographer lady. There's a tepid love scene at the end, and the paleontologist takes a picture of the dead mantis because Colonel Hair Grease and Ms. Gender Unspecified are busy smooching. So kind of a nauseating ending.

Most of the older Scifi classic films like this usually don't turn out to go above the rest, but this movie was certainly one of those lot. I was surprised how well the effects worked in this film. The drone sound created by the vibrations of the Mantis's wings were bone chilling and realistic. The roaring was a bit unusual, but that's okay, because we are supposed to believe it's a monster mantis! I enjoyed the scene with the Greenland Eskimos in that first of all, they used real Eskimo actors, and second, it was believable (though sped up for some reason). I really liked this film, it's not among my favorites should I say, but I thin it's certainly one of the better giant monster films of its time, right among "The Land Unknown" and "The Giant Behemoth".