In Nathan Juran’s The Deadly Mantis, a catastrophic volcanic eruption in the south seas creates a chain reaction that causes icebergs to crumble at the North Pole, freeing a gigantic praying mantis that has been in deep freeze for millions of years. It doesn’t take it long to find its way to a US military base in northern Canada and destroy it. The creature makes its way to the States, pursued by Colonel Joe Parkman (Craig Stevens), Professor Anton Gunther (Florenz Ames), Dr Nedrick Jackson (William Hopper) and magazine editor Marge Blaine (Alix Talton). After attacking an Eskimo village it becomes clear that the mantis preys on human flesh and is heading straight towards Washington…
The greatest threat to the viewer in The Deadly Mantis comes not from the eponymous monster but from the boredom generated by the film’s relentless onslaught of stock footage. Aircraft fly, ships set sail and soldiers go about their daily business thanks to copious footage cribbed from Pentagon recruitment films while the fleeing Eskimos (according to this film, Greenland is populated entirely by stereotypical movie Eskimos and their huskies) are taken from the German/US adventure film S.O.S. Eisberg/S.O.S. Iceberg (1933). At the start of the film it’s a good few minutes before we see anything of any note that isn’t either a map (over which the camera moves very slowly) or stock footage. Strip away the borrowed material and The Deadly Mantis would be considerably shorter.
Which would help tremendously in tightening up the turgid pace.The Deadly Mantis is sluggish in the extreme, too much time being spent in the company of unmemorable characters who having nothing interesting to say or do. Screenwriter Martin Berkeley and producer William Alland, who wrote the story, seem to have seen Gordon Douglas’ much better Them! (1954), decided to have a go at a “big bug” film of their own and then realised that although they had the basic mechanics of the new genre sorted out, they had little idea how to actually get those mechanics moving. Unusually, it’s a 50s giant monster film that doesn’t use nuclear power as the MacGuffin to get the plot moving but that’s the only fresh thing it brings to the table. In The Deadly Mantis, the titular nasty was already huge and it’s freed not because of some ill-advised nuclear shenanigans but through an act of nature. Admittedly the science involved is shaky (would a volcanic eruption in the south seas really cause icebergs at the north pole to melt? Why not have the creature trapped in ice at the much closer south pole?) but that’s par for the course for a film that thinks that radar can hear the sound of the approaching mantis.
The Deadly Mantis is a noticeably cheap film. The mantis itself is quite impressive (it’s sometimes played by a 200-foot long papier-mâché model) but the surfeit of stock footage and cheap sets betray Alland’s cost-conscious approach. Juran, hampered by a lack of resources, directs in the most perfunctory manner, keeping the story moving but never quite sparking it into life. He stages one or two memorable moments (the climax, in which the military finally corner the beast in Washington’s Holland Tunnel, is particularly good) but overall, it’s a routine monster romp that pales by comparison to the film that inspired it. The cast are non-descript, their characters there solely to explain what’s going on and give us something to look at until the mantis returns, so it’s hardly a surprise that the performances are merely functional.
There are moments of unintentional humour along the way, for example a scene in which our baffled heroes discuss their inability to locate the mantis while it passes silently past a window behind them. But overall, The Deadly Mantis is a dull, po-faced derivative of Them! but without any of that film’s atmosphere or tension. It plays more as a military recruiting film than a monster movie. We were after all in the era of “reds-under-the-bed” paranoia here and the mantis is more than just a monster, it’s a metaphor for post-war American anxieties about being overrun by foreign powers (i.e., those damn Russkies).
The Deadly Mantis was Nathan Juran’s first skirmish with big screen monsters and he became something of a specialist in the field, subsequently giving us the much better 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957) and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), both featuring creatures from the Ray Harryhausen menagerie, Jack the Giant Killer (1962) and several episodes of monster-friendly TV shows like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964-1968) and Lost in Space (1965-1968). Thankfully most of these featured more engaging scripts with more engaging characters than the ones he was lumbered with here.
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