Beginning of the End (1957)

i must have seen a different film!!

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

Hordes of mutant grasshoppers menace photographs of downtown Chicago.Now if termites had been the menace instead of garden variety grasshoppers, my rear-end might not have ached at the end. Okay, this drive-in special was never intended as Oscar bait. In fact, it hardly makes it as camp, what with all the needless travel time padding the 70-minutes. But you've got to hand it to Graves and Castle who give it their Z-movie all. Then there're those two lordly icons of 50's sci-fi together at last—Ankrum and Browne. No matter how bad the material, they always keep a straight face and stay employed. But come on producer-director Gordon, couldn't you have shown one of those awful scary grasshoppers devouring at least one guy. That way, we could at least have had an 'ick' factor. Otherwise, I kept wondering where the army kept their cans of Raid. As I recall, I was in the back of my teenage Chevy with a six-pack when I first sat through this special. On second viewing, I should have gotten a twelve-pack.

The giant bug sub-genre started in the 1950's. We had ants in Them! (1953) and a spider in Tarantula(1955). Here we have one of the weakest of them all. I am talking about Bert I Gordon's giant grasshopper 1957 movie Beginning of the End. The film is about an agricultural scientist (Peter Graves) who has successfully grown gigantic vegetables using radiation. Unfortunately, the vegetables are then eaten by locusts, which grow to gigantic size and attack the nearby city of Chicago.The "special effects" are as cheap as it is. While the grasshoppers are roaming around Chicago, the buildings they climb up are just photos. The rest of the movie they are green screened. One of the things that help a giant bug movie work, is that the bug is somewhat fearful even when small. Such as ants, spiders, scorpions, mantises, but grasshoppers are not that fearsome.

In the Fifties before he got into Fury and then Mission Impossible Peter Graves was the king of science fiction. Some good, some incredibly bad. He did four films that could be classified in that genre, Red Planet Mars, It Conquered The Earth, Killers From Space, and the last one The Beginning Of The End. The last might arguably be regarded as the best of them.The town of Ludlow, Illinois overnight has its population vanish and its population disappears. A big security blanket is tossed over the situation, but Peggie Castle who is a Lois Lane type reporter discovers the source of the story. Castle is actually the best one in the cast besides those overdeveloped grasshoppers. She's beautiful, determined, and incredibly smart in pursuing her investigative reporting.Her trail leads to a Department of Agriculture station where Peter Graves is a scientist trying to grow big fruit and vegetables not unlike Captain Nemo in Mysterious Island. And like Mysterious Island, some of the animal life get big too. In this case it's some grasshoppers who feast on some atomic isotopes and develop like the ants in Them.The Beginning Of The End is a cheaply made science fiction film, but I rather like it. Mankind is really at a loss to stop these things unless Graves finds a way. Otherwise the locusts who have overrun Chicago may have Chicago blown up with them if Ike gives the OK for a nuclear bomb on an evacuated city.Will Chicago be saved? You have to watch The Beginning Of The End to find out

Okay, my vacation from reviewing has officially come to an end here because a "Mystery Science Theater 3000" cheesy sci-fi flick has finally entered the Bottom 100!!!!! Yay!!!!! And it's called "The Beginning of the End!!!!!" YEAH!!!!!It's a movie about giant mutant grasshoppers that came about from an experiment gone wrong (?) and they crawl up buildings (or in this case, small grasshoppers crawling up postcards of skyscrapers and stuff like that!) LOL look for the words "NEW YORK" or something - Anyway, now I want to talk Richard Dreyfuss style and "pretend" to see what he "thinks" of this movie:"Arrgh.....Two-hundred-grasshoppers-entarr-the-movie-set; only-twelve-yes-count-em-t-w- e-l-v-e-grasshoppers-remain-after-shootin!!!!!" LOL I like "Master of Disguise!"While Rhino pulled the MST3K DVD due to some sort of copyright mishap, "The Beginning of the End," like the DVD cover suggested, is nothing but cheese from start - to finish!!!!!1/10