The Deadly Mantis

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bookworm
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The Deadly Mantis

Post by bookworm »

A channel I get that plays old shows and movies had this on, I'm sure because of the new Godzilla movie, and when I read the description I just had to watch it. I mean, listen to this: "A giant prehistoric praying mantis, recently freed from the Arctic ice, voraciously preys on American military."

I expected it to be dumb, but it was actually a very enjoyable old movie. Because of the age of course there are some corny individual parts, you can't avoid that, but the movie as a whole was in fact quite good. I was pleasantly surprised, and I legitimately enjoyed it for what it was when I had expected I would have to enjoy it through a lens of remembering when it was made.

One thing that made it cool was that it used actual historic elements from the Cold War in its story like the arctic radar fences and the civilian ground observer corps.
Also, with the monster being a mantis it just inherently had some really cool imagery, like when a soldier tried to fight it with a flamethrower and when it was in a dogfight with a squadron of fighter planes.
And it had what I think, in all sincerity, is one of the greatest scenes ever in cinema: A giant praying mantis crawling up the Washington Monument. Just look at this:
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The Top Crusader
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Post by The Top Crusader »

Yeah, The Deadly Mantis is fun. I'd hesitate to call it a classic tier film of the genre, but it's a high quality B-movie. I have an old beat up "novelization" of the movie somewhere, I'll have to dig it up. I got mine off of ebay a few years ago but when I was a kid the library had a big series of books that it was a part of, a lot of it WAS the outright classics... Godzilla, King Kong, Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolfman, Invisible Man, Creature from the Black Lagoon (clearly lots and lots of the Universal horror from the 1930's and 1940's), but it had a few oddball things like this and The Blob and Murder in the Rue Morgue and such.

EDIT: Do you happen to remember what station that was on? I have tons of stations I never even bother turning to, but I'm curious if I get it. I did discover late last night that one of the multiple Epix movie channels that I get was having a Godzilla marathon all day, which I still get overly excited over, even though I have them all on various forms of home media already.
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Post by bookworm »

It was on MeTV. I don’t think you can get it on cable or anything, it’s a plain old antenna station. If you do get it I think you’d like it, they play a ton of old tv shows, and on Saturday nights they do old horror and monster movies.
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The Top Crusader
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Post by The Top Crusader »

Ah, okay. It's not around here, I think I have a vague recollection of picking it up in other cities. :(

Regular cable stations like TBS and TNT used to do marathons of stuff like that all the time back in the day (that's where I got my start in the genre--Grandpa Munster hosted giant monster movies Saturdays on TBS after professional wrestling) but it has almost vanished entirely from television, with a rare exception from Turner Classic Movies who once in a blue moon will air a few things like that.
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Post by Catspaw »

I had to click this thread just to see what it was about, since the title was so intriguing! I do not think that I will be looking for this movie. ;) I am super surprised to hear that Top has seen it! :shock:
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