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Something strange is happening in remote areas of the Arctic. An Air Force weather station is found wrecked, its occupants missing. An Eskimo village is destroyed. A fishing vessel disappears. Curious spoors are found in the snow. A four-foot piece of a living organism is found near a destroyed airplane. The piece looks like half of the claw of a giant Alaskan crab. The military (Craig Stevens as an Air Force officer) and its experts are baffled. A distinguished scientist (William Hopper) and his pretty assistant (Alix Taltan) are called in from New York. Hopper deduces from this flimsy evidence that they are dealing with a monstrous praying mantis. He's right. The pretty assistant happens to look out the window of the office and sees the hideous face with its bulging eyeballs staring in at her. She drops what she's carrying, claps her hands to her cheeks, and screams in horror.
The mantis begins flying South along the Gulf Stream, pausing now and again to attack major population centers like Washington and New York to overturn buses and eat people. Military weapons don't affect it much but finally Stevens crashes into it in his jet fighter and mortally damages the beast, which comes to earth and occupies the "Manhattan Tunnel" linking New York and New Jersey.
Stevens, having survived the collision, leads his team into the tunnel and kills the big bug with "3RG mines" despite its fierce appearance, threatening behavior, and earth-shattering roars. Stevens and Taltan kiss in front of the body while Hopper chuckles and takes their picture.
Ho hum.
Like the deadly mantis itself, the formula by this time was panting and gasping for air, flopping around, seeking as its prey not human beings but anything at all in the way of a fresh or original idea. As it is, they overlooked one cliché. Hopper should have hurriedly had to invent a Super Duper DDT that, alone, could defeat the insect. That's what the 3RG mines should have been filled with, rather than ordinary explosive.
The model work is pretty good, considering what the budget must have been. Not much money could have been spent on anything else because everything else is pretty routine. Craig Stevens is bland, a face and style made for a TV series. William Hopper looks right -- tall and silver haired -- but his instrument has only one note. The pretty assistant is rather plain, considering her role. The part calls for Joan Weldon or Laurie Nelson. They couldn't act either but carried with them slight but distinct intimations of molestibility. Anything would have helped this fagged-out movie.
I wish the deadly mantis hadn't roared so loudly and so often because you can't roar -- you can't even whisper -- if you don't have lungs. I didn't mind, though, when the monster met its demise in the tunnel. A praying mantis is a graceful insect in its own spindly way and it's great to have them in the garden because they eat caterpillars and whatnot. But when you get right down to it, they aren't really very appealing. The male mantis is smaller and weaker than the female, as in humans, and when the couple are just about through copulating, the female bites the head off the male, also as in humans. But at least human males know when to stop. The male mantis keeps on copulating for several minutes even though he is now without a head. We humans don't have mindless males copulating with goal-driven females. Do we?


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