Contentar Best movie of this year hands down!

FuzzyTagz If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Bea Swanson This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

mark.waltz Deliciously bad, this has a few thoughtful moments where reporter Peggie Castle declares in her cynical manner that you never get used to seeing the aftermath of disaster, and in this film, she gets to see her share of horror too with men bigger than her being eaten by the likes of Jimminy Cricket! There's no wishing upon a star for survival here because these giant grasshoppers/locusts/crickets (whatever you want to call them) have an outrageous appetite and are now flooding the south side of Chicago. But before you break into the Ray Price song or "Bad Bad, LeRoy Brown", check out this ultra campy 1950's B science fiction anti-nuclear power horror film where the ideals of giant strawberries and tomatoes created by nerdy scientist Peter Graves lead to the creation of giant blood thirsty creatures. When first seen, the giant cricket comes upon its unknowing victim and gets the audience's attention, not because it is scary, but because its poor victim is so pathetic and lovable. But as lovable as the victim is, that doesn't make this movie any better as the army of crickets stalk the army of man, not leaving any trace of them, just as they had done with the town first attacked by them that has the over crowded population of 132.While I can see some people putting this on their list of the worst movies ever made, I call this one a guilty pleasure, which up there with the atomic turkey in "The Giant Claw" is one of the silliest looking movie monsters ever. Photos of Chicago buildings (one of which looks like downtown Manhattan's Municipal Building) with the bugs walking on them are so blurry that the so-called special effect is entirely obvious. While I expected to see one of the bugs walk off of the building altogether, there was only a hint of that. There is the repeated shot of the crickets falling off of the building after being shot at, the panic in the streets and parks as public announcements are made of not to panic, interrupted by the loud chirping and sudden arrival of the big pesky bugs. Certainly, the producers and director knew that this would be panned and considered one of the worst movies of the year (or ever), but they knew that they could make a quick bug, oops, I mean buck, and even today, it is deliciously funny even if there was a panic of how nuclear power and other discoveries of the time could have major impacts on things on our planet we take for granted. When this is all said and done, it is an enjoyable guilty pleasure, leading to a clinch for the leading man and lady that prior to that fade-out had not even been hinted at.

Hitchcoc 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.

daikaiju1954 The giant bug sub-genre started in the 1950's. We had ants in Them! (1953) and a spider in Tarantula(1955). Here we have one of the weakest of them all. I am talking about Bert I Gordon's giant grasshopper 1957 movie Beginning of the End. The film is about an agricultural scientist (Peter Graves) who has successfully grown gigantic vegetables using radiation. Unfortunately, the vegetables are then eaten by locusts, which grow to gigantic size and attack the nearby city of Chicago.The "special effects" are as cheap as it is. While the grasshoppers are roaming around Chicago, the buildings they climb up are just photos. The rest of the movie they are green screened. One of the things that help a giant bug movie work, is that the bug is somewhat fearful even when small. Such as ants, spiders, scorpions, mantises, but grasshoppers are not that fearsome.

ctomvelu1 The film that helped usher in Hollywood's giant bug craze, this isn't half-bad. Special effects are pathetic even for the time, but the story is gripping enough and the acting first-rate. Peter Graves plays a scientist working on food growth via radiation. Grasshoppers get at these plants and grow to the size of a bus. They find humans much tastier than their usual fare. They invade Chicago after tearing up the countryside, and it's a race to the finish to see whether anything can be done to stop them before the Army nukes Chicago. Morris "Colonel Fielding" Ankrum is a grumpy general, and Peggie Castle is a reporter investigating the story. Lots of fun. We never see the monsters actually come into contact with any of the humans they devour, but the closeup facial shots of various actors about to be eaten are priceless.