31 Days of Cheese Day 16: The Beginning of the End

And one more “bug/insect/small thing made huge by radiation coming to eat us film” this is 1957’s Beginning of the End staring Peter Graves.

In 1954 the movie Them featuring Giant Ants was released and was a huge hit. There followed scads of bug movies of which this is one.

This is an almost paint by numbers reworking of Them done to the casting of Peter Graves who was James Arness’s brother (who was in Them) except with Grasshoppers. Yeah they are called locusts in the film but what we have here are grass hoppers.

And while Them went for mechanical effects to simulate the giant ants. The director of this film, Schlock mister supreme Bert I. Gordon used real grasshoppers using either rear projection, miniature sets or just having the bugs crawl on pictures to simulate giant bugs.

It’s a massively cheap effect to do and it shows. The grasshoppers, who after all don’t know they are in a movie just walk about and try to escape (as filming went on per IMDB.com they started eating each other as well). And in the final sequence there a few times were the grasshoppers who are supposed to be crawling up a building walk into midair. It’s very very very cheap and fake looking. Really.

Anyway the story concerns the handsome Peter Graves (and that’s the blub on the VHS version I have of this film) who is doing research on the effects of radiation on plants (they make them bigger). It seems some grasshoppers got in, got radiated and then got bigger and now threaten to eat Chicago and the surrounding suburbs. After a long long long battle with the bugs, which consists of lots of stock footage shots, superimposed grasshoppers, people yelling descriptions of things too expensive to film into walky talkies, reaction shots, then more stock footage and so on and so on; Peter and the female lead (who is a reporter but once Peter gets into the act doesn’t do much except look worried) discover a sound that will lure the giants into lake Michigan where they drown. Now this comes after a long sequence – Burt loved to pad his films with this kind of stuff – where Peter tweaks a knob there is a sound and both Peter and the female lead look at some kind of EKG readout that is linked to a captured Grasshopper. Gripping cinema this ain’t.

Rife with bad dialogue, long long sequences where nothing much happens, awash in stock footage and cheap effects this Burt I Gordon as we know him. A bad film maker. Cheap the stuff turned a profit but really just terrible stuff all around.

The highlights of the film are one where the grasshoppers are crawling one the pictures sorry crawling up the buildings in Chicago and earlier where Peter’s deaf mute assistant (Don’t ask – I think it was a way not to give the actor a speaking part. You have to pay more when the actors talk) is eaten by a grasshopper.

Enjoy with a Chicago Style Pizza.