During the 1950s, there were huge numbers of giant creatures gone wild films. There were giant Gila Monsters, ants, bees, wasps, shrews...you name it. What most of these movies also have in common is that they were terrible--with lousy special effects and silly stories. One of the few exceptions was "Them!". While not high art, at least they created some cool giant fake ants for this one. Most of the rest of the films really dropped the ball and the scary creatures looked utterly ridiculous...and this is definitely the case with "The Beginning of the End"."The Beginning of the End" is a film that finds enormous grasshoppers that cannot be easily stopped thanks to the miracle of radiation! Entymologist, Dr. Wainwright (Peter Graves), and newspaper reporter, Audrey Aimes (Peggie Castle), try to warn folks...but naturally no one will listen until it's almost too late.The biggest problem with this film is the utter cheapness of the production. Many of the scenes where the military attacks the creatures are laughable--sloppy in every possible way. It's very obvious that many of the clips are just stock military footage with grasshoppers sloppily placed on top of the footage. And, to make it worse, a very high percentage of the film consists of this footage. The scenes without the footage are actually pretty good and the folks do their best. It's hard to believe now, since he had a good career in films and television, but Peter Graves made several crappy sci-fi/horror films in the 1950s. So, if you find this film unintentionally hilarious, will you be in for a treat if you see him in "It Conquered the World" or "Killers from Space"...films so bad that "The Beginning of the End" looks almost like "Masterpiece Theatre" by comparison!!

The movie starts out with a couple of "out of control" teenagers necking in a car. Of course, for their horrid behavior (by 1950's standards), they end up being eaten by a grasshopper. Don't you hate when that happens. We find out that an entire town has been decimated and all the residents nowhere to be seen. Peter Graves has been experimenting with a radio-active plant supplement (like in "Tarantula") and is growing tomatoes and strawberries to enormous sizes. For the time being, they are inedible. For the time being, no one puts two and two together. An attractive reporter talks Peter and his deaf/mute assistant (done in by radioactivity) to the scene of a destroyed warehouse where tons of grain was stored. Well, the poor disabled guy gets eaten by a grasshopper. Now they need to convince the army guys that these bugs are around and find a way to stop them. This is a nicely set up monster movie. What pretty much diminishes it are the lousy special effects. The grasshoppers are nothing like the backgrounds, so they are obviously superimposed. At times we can actually see through them. It's also hard to figure out how big they are. Anyway, when they appear it begins to be laughable. Also, a lot of soldiers must have gone home after the war because the guys in this movie are utterly incompetent. Graves also runs the gamut of emotions from A to B. I get a kick out of this movie, but my standards aren't that high.

I've heard it said that if you've seen one giant monster or nature run amuk movie, you've seen them all. I'm not sure about that, but I do feel safe in saying that if you've seen one Bert I Gordon movie, you've seen them all. "Who's that?" you say. Bert I Gordon, aka Mr. B.I.G., was a somewhat prolific B-movie director from the fifties through the seventies, rather in the same vein as Roger Corman.But while Mr. Corman worked mainly for American International Pictures, and directed all manner of low-budget offerings, Gordon worked for whatever studio would hire him, and had a more specialized niche: movies about giant creatures. He did endless variations on this theme; giant ants in Empire of the Ants, prehistoric beasts in King Dinosaur, giant rats and wasps in Food of the Gods, out of control teenage giants in Village of the Giants, and giant locusts in this film, Beginning of the End.Another difference between Corman and Gordon was their production values. Corman usually had low budgets to work with, necessitating the use of flimsy models, cheap monster suits, second rate production facilities, and a fair amount of stock footage. The budgets of Gordon's films on the other hand were virtually nonexistent, forcing him to rely on improvised sound stages in offices or vacant warehouses, practically endless stock footage, and severe overuse of rear projection shots. This is where you place the actors in front of a screen, onto which you project the giant monsters they're supposed to be fighting or running from.I've already mentioned that this movie is about giant locusts. These locusts became giant because they ate giant vegetables that were created using radioactive isotopes as part of a Department of Agriculture experiment run by Peter Graves. Now based on his later work in movies like Airplane! I still believe him to be a decent actor who got a bad rap. But I admit that seeing the number of Z-grade movies like this that he's appeared in, it's pretty easy to see how he acquired that reputation. But I digress. As a side effect of their rapid growth, the locusts have become ravenous, and carnivorous. And so, after destroying a small town and eating Graves's lab assistant, they attack Chicago and do battle with the United States army.As befitting the nonexistent budget, the special effects are equally nonexistent. The small town destroyed before the start of the movie looks suspiciously like newsreel footage of a tornado's aftermath. And in every scene with the locusts, it's painfully obvious that they're just regular grasshoppers who have been shoddily edited into footage of the actors. Much of the film consists of grasshoppers wandering through battle footage from previous war movies and newsreels. If you look closely you can actually see them walking through the tanks and guns. The handful of extras in soldier's uniforms do their part, firing into the air and backing away in terror, but when their eaten, it's always just off-screen.And for the ultimate in cinematic penny-pinching, look no further than the scenes of locusts climbing Chicago's most famous buildings. Anyone with good eyesight will quickly realize that what the locusts are climbing is actually postcards of famous Chicago buildings. At one point a grasshopper even walks off into thin air- and they still put the shot in the movie. These people weren't even trying. And then there's the rather anti-climactic climax, in which the locusts are lured into Lake Michigan and drown. It's just footage of grasshoppers swarming across stock footage of Grant Park, and then a close up of dead grasshoppers bobbing around in water.The only thing that saves this movie from complete awfulness is the bad laughs generated whenever the locusts appear on screen. Even this would probably have gotten old after a while if I hadn't been watching the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 version. If there was ever a movie that was meant to be mocked, this is it. I would highly recommend MST3K episode to fans of the series or anyone looking for some laughs. As for the original, I can only recommend it for curing insomnia. Trust me; you'll be out cold from boredom long before the first locust appears.

Hordes of mutant grasshoppers menace photographs of downtown Chicago.Now if termites had been the menace instead of garden variety grasshoppers, my rear-end might not have ached at the end. Okay, this drive-in special was never intended as Oscar bait. In fact, it hardly makes it as camp, what with all the needless travel time padding the 70-minutes. But you've got to hand it to Graves and Castle who give it their Z-movie all. Then there're those two lordly icons of 50's sci-fi together at last—Ankrum and Browne. No matter how bad the material, they always keep a straight face and stay employed. But come on producer-director Gordon, couldn't you have shown one of those awful scary grasshoppers devouring at least one guy. That way, we could at least have had an 'ick' factor. Otherwise, I kept wondering where the army kept their cans of Raid. As I recall, I was in the back of my teenage Chevy with a six-pack when I first sat through this special. On second viewing, I should have gotten a twelve-pack.