The Deadly Mantis

Yesterday I watched my favorite big-bug movie, "The Deadly Mantis" (with MST3K commentary). It's a decent story and well-acted, but I'd forgotten how slow it is. It's as if the model mantis (which has decent texture and movement, for the time/genre) had in its contract it only needed to appear 10 percent of the time, so 90 percent is people talking in offices. It opens with a LOT of footage from Air Force training films of the military's early warning radar nets watching the Arctic skies for Russian bombers. It also has the usual glitches of these movies: American planes shoot rockets at the mantis, but when the camera pans back to the planes the rockets are still there under the wings. The stock footage is pretty good throughout if you like 1957-era planes.

The scientist character from a natural history museum tries hard to make it all believable. Someone wrote some dialogue that at least sounds "sceincy." (OK, not the part where he suggests mammoths frozen in Siberia might have been ALIVE when unearthed.)

Still, one of my favorite movie monsters of all time. It ranks, for this era, with the giant ants in Them!

https://mst3k.fandom.com/wiki/MST3K_804_-_The_Deadly_Mantis

Trivia: An Eskimo village is Canada is found abandoned because the mantis attacked and everyone fled. The story is circulated endlessly in paranormal websites and literature as having been a real unexplained disappearance. I wrote once to the RCMP to nail it down, and they politely replied they'd searched their records many times and it hadn't happened.

Other trivia: the newspaper headline in the film (below) is a tribute to my hometown.

UNtil next time, visit me at MattBille.com