Le Début de la fin

Audrey Ames (Peggie Castle), an enterprising journalist, tries to get the scoop on giant grasshoppers accidentally created at the Illinois State experimental farm. She endeavors to save Chicago, despite a military cover-up.

Whether or not you will enjoy this film comes down to whether or not you are ready for good, cheap fun. Yes, the effects are not that amazing and in some cases are incredibly fake. The acting is nothing special, and there are some scenes that are most likely stock footage. But this is a fun, popcorn-eating film! Director Bert Gordon (a Wisconsin native) had his special niche, and he deserves more credit than he usually gets. Maybe some day we will see a nice box set of his work...

The film that helped usher in Hollywood's giant bug craze, this isn't half-bad. Special effects are pathetic even for the time, but the story is gripping enough and the acting first-rate. Peter Graves plays a scientist working on food growth via radiation. Grasshoppers get at these plants and grow to the size of a bus. They find humans much tastier than their usual fare. They invade Chicago after tearing up the countryside, and it's a race to the finish to see whether anything can be done to stop them before the Army nukes Chicago. Morris "Colonel Fielding" Ankrum is a grumpy general, and Peggie Castle is a reporter investigating the story. Lots of fun. We never see the monsters actually come into contact with any of the humans they devour, but the closeup facial shots of various actors about to be eaten are priceless.

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

Thank you Bert I Gordon for making films which nobody else (except maybe Roger Corman) would dare to make, and for making them so definitively that no one would ever dare to remake them.

The Beginning of the End actually has a promising beginning. It follows Audrey Aimes (Castle) a young woman reporter who runs into a military roadblock and begins snooping around by introducing herself to the operation's CO, who happens to have read some of her wartime coverage and is willing to cooperate to a point. Weird and inexplicable happenings have been reported in a nearby town (site of the roadblock). In fact, we discover, the entire town has been wiped out. When Audrey finally gets to briefly tour the site, we are shown some footage of tornado devastation which is supposed to be the result. Then she meets Peter Graves (playing Peter Graves playing an entomologist working with radioactive plants). there is a decent enough amount of back-story, and the characters are all likable and interesting, but then theatrical disaster strikes - in the form of a totally ludicrous plot.

Two words - giant grasshoppers. And they are split-screened (poorly) into stock footage or scraps from some heavily edited war movie. I .... just can't go ... on.

As the absurdities continue to unfold, you will be impressed by the absolute seriousness with which the cast portrays their characters, and positively blown away by the enormously long cinematographic (un)dramatic pauses as we watch hordes of soldiers marching by in different directions with nothing going on around them, giant out-of-focus grasshoppers climbing up postcards of skyscrapers and sometimes slipping on the glossy surface, and 1-2 minute-long fixed frame shots of cars approaching from miles away.

I love giant monster movies, but this is definitely not one of the better ones. Still, it's harmless, more intelligent than the average sex comedy and more relevant than the usual political campaign.

A pair of amorous teenagers disappear, their car found... destroyed! A small town is demolished, its inhabitants... gone! Police are baffled! The military gets involved! Could all of this be somehow connected to a government project using radiation to grow beach ball sized tomatoes?

It's up to photojournalist, Audrey Aimes (Peggie Castle) and the project's director, Dr. Ed Wainwright (Peter Graves) to solve this mystery before more tragedies strike.

BEGINNING OF THE END is Director Bert I. Gordon's "big bug" extravaganza. He uses a horde of hungry, super-imposed grasshoppers to provide the sheer terror. These huge, mostly disinterested hoppers are a hoot! The Army's first, disastrous encounter with them is a gut-buster as well! The ultimate weapon used against the angry insects is also quite amusing. One of Gordon's most entertaining efforts...