Now this is a Cold War movie. And I mean “cold.” The Deadly Mantis is one of those movies that hovers between “so bad it’s good” and just plain “so bad.” I was kind of rooting for the mantis. In any case, this was an ambitious movie for the time but it reflects the post-war paranoia in the United States. It also makes very abundant use of stock footage, much of it military. You almost expect a recruiting ad at the end. (It does thank the Ground Observer Corps in the closing credits.) Okay, so here’s the story. A volcano in the south Atlantic causes the calving of an enormous Arctic iceberg near the North Pole. That iceberg contains the frozen body of a 200-foot praying mantis from dinosaur times. Even earlier. Said frozen mantis, quite hungry after millions of years, begins attacking Arctic radar bases and flying south. The Air Force calls in a paleontologist to help identify what they’re looking for.
The mantis is so big that it prefers people for food, although, one might note, a polar bear would’ve been easier prey. In any case, given the technology limitations of the time, the military has trouble keeping track of the insect as it flies over the most populous part of the country. They do get the cloudiness of the East Coast about right. Eventually they shoot it down—actually a fighter jet crashing into it does the job—over Newark and the mortally wounded mantis crawls into the Lincoln Tunnel (called “The Manhattan Tunnel” in the film). By this point the viewer is saying “just let the poor thing die in peace,” but they pump smoke into the tunnel, presumably to hide wires and other props, and commit a protracted insecticide.
Now, I’m one of those people who hates to hurt any animal. The death twitches of an insect are quite troubling, so I try to catch what I can indoors and release them. I have trouble with the instructions to kill spotted lantern flies—it’s not their fault that they’re here. The movie shows a bravado regarding the military and a machismo regarding the main female character that hearkens back to why it was so necessary to evolve out of the fifties. Of course, we learned nothing from The Deadly Mantis and have catapulted back into a new Cold War and an even more robust military. William Alland, the producer, had a real love of this genre of movie, and for that we have much to be grateful. But even the big bug genre can produce a real groaner now and then.
