Beginning of the End (1957) on Netflix
Reporter Audrey Aimes finds a small Illinois town destroyed and all 150 residents missing. At a Department of Agriculture farm, Dr. Ed Wainwright says locusts ate his radioactive wheat.
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- IMDb4.2/103,172 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Trailer
Plot summary
Driving along an Illinois highway, reporter Audrey Aimes is stopped by the military and learns that a small town has been wrecked and all 150 of its residents have vanished. The fields around it are stripped bare, as if locusts had eaten every crop. Aimes goes to a Department of Agriculture experimental farm to find out what creature could have done such damage. There she meets Dr. Ed Wainwright, the lab's director, who grows giant fruits and vegetables with radiation to fight world hunger. He tells her that locusts got into a silo holding his radioactive wheat, and that strange incidents have been reported in the area ever since. The insects that fed on the grain have grown to monstrous size.
Cast
- John Closeas Maj. Everett
- Hylton Socheras Frank - Soldier
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Beginning of the End (1957)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- For the film's live-insect effects, Bert I. Gordon had to buy grasshoppers from Waco, Texas, the only species large enough to hold focus; California agricultural officials let him import only males, so the insects would not breed, and counted them individually.
- Gordon kept the live grasshoppers in a box for only a few days before he got around to shooting them, and in that time they turned cannibalistic, leaving just 12 of the animals.
- Rather than build miniatures, Gordon filmed real grasshoppers crawling on still photographs of the Wrigley Building and other Chicago landmarks, and when a monster was supposed to be shot he tipped the photo so the grasshoppers slid down it.
- Actress Mala Powers was being considered for the female lead in late November 1956, but on December 2 the studio instead announced Peter Graves and Peggie Castle as the film's leads.
- AB-PT shut its operations immediately after releasing the film; Gordon's work on it earned him a new contract with American International Pictures, and the week it opened he began shooting The Amazing Colossal Man for AIP.
- According to the National Wildlife Federation's magazine in 1995, the film was the most popular title shown at the Insect Fear Film Festival at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
- The film was parodied in the 1999 Simpsons episode "E-I-E-I-(Annoyed Grunt)", in which Homer Simpson, voiced by Dan Castellaneta, grows giant vegetables with radiation and assumes any animal that eats them will become monstrous.
