kevinolzak Review of Beginning of the End

Beginning of the End (1957)

Seen on Pittsburgh's Chiller Theater in 1963

[3/10 · 31 March 2019]

Director Bert I. Gordon deserves some credit for his 1957 "Beginning of the End," for at least not giving away its menace in the title as entries like "Tarantula," "The Deadly Mantis," or "The Black Scorpion," toplining well known cast members such as Peter Graves ("Red Planet Mars," "Killers from Space," "It Conquered the World"), Peggie Castle ("Invasion USA," "Back from the Dead"), and the extremely prolific Morris Ankrum. It's a good thing they were hired because the script slavishly apes the 1954 "Them!" right from the opening where two patrolmen investigate a mysterious disappearance, then relay headquarters that the entire Illinois town of Ludlow has been destroyed, and all 150 residents gone. Peggie Castle's news correspondent takes a back seat once Peter Graves enters as an entomologist/anthropologist, whose experiments using radiation to enlarge certain types of fruits and vegetables have yielded a mutation of gigantic proportions, a plague of locusts described as voracious eaters who undoubtedly devour human prey. There's no explanation as to why only locusts are affected, and the perfunctory military response is mostly talked about rather than seen. The final assault on Chicago found Gordon using photographic blowups of skyscrapers onto which the insects crawled, one of the few effects that seem to work. Ultimately the performance of the ever reliable Graves carries the picture through its dull stretches, no mean feat considering how little he was forced to work with. After smaller budgeted efforts "King Dinosaur" and "The Cyclops", this Republic success earned its director a contract with American International, where most of his films would be made into the late 1970s, and this picture's echoes of H.G. Wells' "The Food of the Gods" would be a topic that apparently Gordon just couldn't leave well enough alone.