THE DEADLY MANTIS (1957)

We open with five minutes of maps, stock footage, and a narrator droning on about how radar is our country's first line of defense. In the Southern hemisphere, a volcano explodes and since, as our narrator reminds us, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, there is also an explosion in the Arctic. The men at Red Eagle One, an American military post in Northern Canada along the DEW line (that's the Distant Early Warning line of defense as the narrator helpfully tells us), realize that one of the weather outposts has not reported in. Military man Craig Stevens flies up there to find the outpost in shambles, strange gigantic tracks in the snow, and no one, living or dead, present. Next, a weird blip is seen on radar just before an Air Force plane is attacked and downed. Again, there are no bodies but a huge chunk of matter looking like a claw is found which is determined to be, indeed, from a living creature. In Washington, a paleontologist (William Hopper) figures out that they're dealing with a giant prehistoric praying mantis that is eating its human victims. 

Need I go on? This is one of a number of relatively interchangeable SF movies from the 50s about giant monsters, and it seems to have been built on the template of one of the first and best of the genre, 1954's THEM; it begins with a couple of mysterious attacks, then scientists figure out what’s going on, and there's a climax in an urban setting. The title makes this sound a bit silly, but it mostly takes itself seriously. Stevens and Hopper don't look too embarrassed to be involved; Alix Talton, the female interest, playing a magazine editor, has to undergo a dreadful scene (not too dissimilar from an early scene in THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD) where a bunch of military men in the Arctic Circle who have been without female companionship for months start drooling and bucking when she arrives at their base. It's so bad the movie almost doesn't recover. (Paul Smith so overdoes his butch reaction that he comes off as a closeted gay man afraid of not seeming boorishly straight enough.) But movies of this genre live and die not on acting, but special effects. When the mantis is shown flying, it doesn't look like a mantis at all, but in other scenes, a combination of miniatures, a life-sized model and, maybe, a real mantis give this movie's effects a passing grade. In addition to the decent climax on the streets of New York City, there is a nice fog-shrouded scene in which the mantis attacks a bus. Overall, if you can get past that batch of horny men in the Arctic, it's fairly painless. [DVD]