Beginning of the End

Poster tagline: NEW THRILLS! NEW SHOCKS! NEW TERROR! Supposedly, this is Gordon's most ambitious project, but even here the "Master" did not transcend his reputation. Once again his typical trademark, mutations, this time of giant grasshoppers. "The Late Arrival" of the monsters is a Gordon classic, this time with the first half hour of endless chatter, an aspiring journalist driving from a mysteriously destroyed city to a police station, back and forth, spouting platitudes about how sad it was to photograph a bombed-out Berlin after World War II. The arrival of the five-metre long grasshoppers is quite comical, they just suddenly "hatch" out of the ground and attack people with a terrible noise. This film is a textbook example of what rear projection is NOT supposed to look like. It does not fit either situationally or in contrast with the rest of the film, there is no interaction at all, the combat "action" consists of soldiers swaying their bodies from side to side before the projection to give the appearance of dynamism. The high point is the rampage of the grasshoppers in Chicago. Gordon solved the footage of them climbing on the buildings by letting them climb on the photographs (!) of the real buildings with careful camera shots and when a grasshopper is "shot down", it is simply blown away from the photo by a person out of the camera's frame! The final showdown, a 5-second drowning of the grasshoppers in a lake, is portrayed with a shot of insects splashing in some sort of puddle, probably due to the low budget. Funniest moment: The grasshopper watching an unsuspecting woman blow-drying her hair through the window of a tower block was endearing, but I choose the moment when the monsters are rampaging in Chicago, chasing scared-to-death Americans through parks and streets, with the city's PA speakers telling them to remain calm and not to panic. (2008.02.07)