Movies: Pass the Bug Spray, Please!

In Film, Size Does Matter

Where does a ten foot long ant go? Anywhere he wants to. That goes double for huge grasshoppers and spiders too. The giant spider and ant angles have been used several times in the movies, and not always with good results. Back in the 50s, some movies with giant animals had a shoestring budget, and it showed flagrantly on-screen. We could tell that it was a regular sized lizard crawling next to a toy car, but we didn't care back then. Our date would be scared stiff and hung on to us, boosting both our ego and libido.

Large, even gigantic animals hold a certain fascination for us because they take something we're familiar with and turn it into a travesty of evil, almost like the negative to a photograph. In some cases, these films used current or future big name stars who, in retrospect, should have known better than to take that role. You can still catch a couple of these features, although rarely, on American Movie Classics or one of the Turner television cable channels. Some of these are quite good, and some will make you laugh when you see them again. The dates in parentheses denote the original release date of the films. Got your elephant gun ready? Come on, you'll probably need it.

1) The Deadly Mantis (May 1957). Craig Stevens, who played Peter Gunn on TV, and William Hopper, Perry Mason's Paul Drake, head the cast trying to kill a gigantic praying mantis that was released from a calving iceberg in the Arctic (where have we heard this before?). It starts heading south, but appears to have gotten a bootleg copy of MapQuest with the wrong information because it arrives in Washington DC on its way to New York. The novel way the script calls for its death, getting snuffed out inside the Lincoln Tunnel, is something New York City commuters fear to this day.