Every year in mid-February the Entomology Department at the University of Illinois sponsors an Insect Fear Festival, free to the public and showcasing the film industry’s portrayals of insects, using, if the past two years are anything to go on, a few animated shorts, an episode of a television show, and a movie. What ties these together is a theme insect; last year’s was ticks, this year’s praying mantises.

The feature movie was an enjoyable one for a genre that can be aggravatingly bad. The Deadly Mantis is a blend of just the right sort of badness played with such complete sincerity that it is hard to be harsh on its faults. Although, of course, those faults are many. But it is so easy to look at these people and fill in more interesting stories… I would suggest that the minor actors are so mannered or characterized, that there seems to be a greater depth to this film than was perhaps intended, and I’d in fact be more interested in seeing the movie where the giant mantis didn’t attack the Arctic military base, and the characters were just allowed to stew together going about their business. The cheerful but micromanaging colonel, the radioman who is surprised when he’s asked to do his job, the daydreaming corporal, trapped together in a barren wasteland… well, it would hardly make a sillier movie.

The what there is of a plot, of course, makes no sense. Some sort of explosion (perhaps volcanic?) on an island off of Antarctica sends tremors through the Arctic that break off a glacier, freeing the gigantic Deadly Mantis. Then there is a ten minute explanation of the importance of radar and how the US and Canada have cooperatively build three radar nets, one at our border with Canada, one in the middle of Canada, and one apparently on those glacial islands that are north most Canada and on Greenland, to keep the Russians from flying over the pole without our knowing. This was so extravagantly detailed and fairly ancillary to the plot, that it was likely lifted from stock footage. I’m not making this charge lightly; there is a scene with Eskimos later on that was apparently taken wholesale from a film released two decades earlier, and it’s fairly obvious from watching it that that’s the case, the style of that scene is different from that of the rest of the film.

So, just when you’ve forgotten that there was a giant mantis involved, it attacks a remote outpost and then a plane, where our major discovers the vital clue that leads the curator the Smithsonian’s Natural History museum (eventually) to the conclusion that there is, in fact, a giant mantis out there, deprived on the insects that it used to prey on in the prehistoric era it had once lived in, was substituting humans, who are roughly the same size. And in all this, there is a requisite love story (but you can’t help cheering for the girl, she’s so upfront about her own predatory instincts) and the same ridiculous assertions by people playing scientists that make many of these monster films so delightful. That, and the terrible special effects. And the radar does keep coming up, but compared to the way radar is portrayed in later movies, one isn’t sure if these men know how to work their machines… but after all, that’s just part of the fun!

One final note, this movie was fodder for the eighth season of MST3K, if you can manage to find this episode, I imagine it would be worth the search.