The Tarantula vs The Deadly Mantis
The FORBIDDEN Death Battle Prediction Blog Episode 24
Original Fight 13
The Tarantula (The Tarantula, 1955) vs The Deadly Mantis (The Deadly Mantis, 1957)
Who Are These Characters? What’s The Theme Here?
You see the picture, right?
Okay, a little context.
If you think 1950’s sci-fi, you probably think schlock. You probably think ape suits with diver helmets from Robot Monster and the mutant Beaky Buzzard from The Giant Claw. You probably think MST3K fodder. But there were gems during the days of sock hops and drive-ins. The big 5 were Forbidden Planet, The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The War of the Worlds, and a movie about giant ants called Them!
Them! was a hit at the drive-ins and for good reason–it’s a film that still holds up to this day. The film is all about escalation. It starts with a small town mystery, a traumatized little girl wandering the deserts alone and a mysterious high-pitched noise that makes her shout THEM! THEM!, and escalates to soldiers storming bunker-sized ant hills with flame throwers. It’s a great flick and I highly recommend it.
Them! was released by Warner Bros. in 1954 and made them a nice stack of cash. Other producers looked at the stack of cash and decided they wanted to try and replicate the success of Them! This led to the creation of the giant insect sub-genre for drive-in sci-fi. By 1961, even Japan had gotten in on the action with Mothra.
Our fight today is takes Universal’s two responses to Them! and has them battle. It’s a fight between two of the biggest (pun so very intended) insect monsters of the 1950’s. And since they’re from horror films by Universal, they’re members of the same club Dracula and Larry Talbot belong to.
Who wants to fight a tag-team of a giant tarantula and a giant mantis in the next Castlevania?
What, you say they’re too early to belong to the Universal monster club? Nonsense! The Gill-Man is a card-carrying member with his own action figures and model kits and appearance in The Monster Squad and his films were in 1954, 1955, and 1956.
What, you now say they don’t belong because they’re giants? Giant monsters go to Club Godzilla, normal-sized monsters go to Club Dracula, is that it?
Well, clearly you haven’t seen the Creature from the Black Lagoon musical.
I envy you.
The Deadly Mantis
“I’m convinced that we’re dealing with a Mantis in whose geological world the smallest insects were as large as man, and now failing to find those insects as food, well… it’s doing the best that it can.”
The MST3K Episode. Believe You Me, You Do Not Want To See This Without Commentary.
The Deadly Mantis tried to be Them! plus Beast From 20,000 Fathoms.
It tried.
The film starts with an atomic bomb test creating shockwaves that jar the Mantis out of its Captain America sleep in the middle of the Arctic. You see, aeons ago, creatures like the Mantis were common. The world was savage and primeval and it belonged to them. Now because of man’s folly, the creature returns to life to find itself in a strange world ruled by tiny hu-mans. The creature is confused…and hungry…
It’s just like Beast From 20,000 Fathoms.
The Mantis attacks a DEW line outpost and an Eskimo village, but the military has no idea what they’re dealing with. The only evidence the Mantis leaves behind comes in the form of eye witness accounts and a piece of claw left behind.
It’s just like Them!
Eventually, the creature’s identity becomes known and the military scrambles to exterminate the Mantis.
There is something the film has that’s all its own–lots of stock footage of soldiers scrambling. Lots and lots of stock footage of soldiers scrambling. If that’s your thing you’re going to love this film.
The Mantis is eventually forced down by fighter jets over New York City and seeks shelter in the subway. Soldiers gear up in hazmat suits to finish off the beast with chemical mines in a dumbed-down and less exciting version of the finales of Them! and Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Soldiers had to rescue a child from the ants during the climax of Them! and the Rhedosaurus from Beast had to be finished off by a trick shot form atop a roller coaster. The soldiers in The Deadly Mantis just throw two chemical mines at the Mantis and call it a day.
I don’t recommend the film. At all. The only good parts of the film come from the creature. It’s quite the nice special effect, and there are some shots where the Mantis looks great and you can see what the creators were going for with this weird, spindly body and glowing white eyes. It’s just too bad the Mantis is in like, ten minutes tops of footage.
The Deadly Mantis’ Size
It’s around 200 feet.
In the film, the Mantis climbs up the Washington Monument, a 555 foot obelisk capped with aluminum, which used to be worth a pretty penny back in 1885. We don’t have any good shot of the Mantis with the full Washington Monument in view, but going by this pic:
We can estimate that the Mantis is about a third of the Washington Monument, so about 185 feet. This is backed by the Movie Monster Wiki which gives the Mantis’ height as about 200 feet.
To further support the estimate, Universal actually made a 200 foot paper-mache Mantis for the filming. It’s reasonable to assume that the in-story Mantis is about the same size as the prop Mantis.
God, how I wish that prop was still around…is the Blob the only giant monster prop from this time period to survive? That little wad of silicone is the last of an ancient breed…
The Deadly Mantis’ Feats
–Created so much force flying over an antarctic outpost that it made the roof fall in.
I would like to point out that Rodan did the “destroy buildings by flying close to them” trick first among movie monsters.
No one ever gives Rodan the respect he deserves…
–Made a jet crash by flying close to it.
–Is said to be ”Strong beyond anything its size suggests.” by a scientist. You know he’s legit because he has a white coat.
–Smashed in the roof of a building with one claw swing.
–Was unharmed by a machine gun and flamethrower fired to at his (her?) bug-eyed face.
–Demolished a bus.
–Kept up with fighter jets.
–It took 4 missiles and crashing into a jet head-on to ground it, but it was otherwise unharmed.
–Unharmed by a squad of soldiers unloading their rifles into it.
–It took two chemical mines to kill the Mantis. Why these chemical mines had to be physically thrown at the Mantis and not fired at him from a distance, I have no idea. I guess they wanted to repeat the climax of Them! where the good guys had to get up-close to the ants to save a kid.
The Tarantula
“You make them sound like pets!”
“Not pets, doctor, just part of the world around us. We must accept them just as we do the rest of God’s creatures. Each has a function in its own world.”
“But what if circumstances magnified one of them in size and strength? Took it out of its primitive world and turned it loose on ours?”
“Then expect something fiercer and more cruel and deadly than anything that ever walked the Earth.”
The Trailer, In All Its Retro Glory!
Brandon Tenold’s Review. Quite Entertaining!
I had a bad feeling going into this movie. The Deadly Mantis gave me little hope for Universal’s other insect film. But when I saw the film open by having a mutated looking man stumble through the desert, I got some hope. This looked interesting. There was some mystery here.
The Tarantula is a murder mystery with a giant monster tacked on. It changes up the giant monster formula, but I wouldn’t say the result is a classic. It’s a lot better than The Deadly Mantis, but I wouldn’t recommend the film unless you’re deep into retro sci-fi or giant monsters. It’s your standard B-movie. The plot is serviceable and the Tarantula itself looks cool as this creepily wiggling black body crawling over a white desert.
When the assistant to a reclusive scientist living in a small desert community turns up dead by the highway, a doctor is flown in to investigate. The scientist claims that his assistant died from his acromegalia (now called acromegaly), a rare hormone disorder caused by the pituitary gland producing too much growth hormone. It’s what Andre the Giant and Richard Kiel had. The doctor is suspicious though. Acromegaly doesn’t develop rapidly. He investigates, and finds that the scientist has been experimenting with radioactive growth hormones in the hopes of curing world hunger through giant cattle and plants.
Come on dude. There’s no excuse. HG Wells wrote The Food of the Gods in 1904. You should know the dangers of introducing boom food to a population.
The scientist doesn’t just experiment on voluntary humans, however. He experiments on involuntary animals–including a certain insect that escaped his lab during a fire and continued to grow in the desert. Now, the Tarantula prowls the Mojave hunting and killing cattle and cattle ranchers liquifying their remains with its venom and sucking the bones dry…
Who can save the day? Why, Clint Eastwood in one of his first film roles as a fighter pilot! Clint drops napalm on the Tarantula like its a Vietnamese village and makes its day.
The Tarantula’s Size
The movie poster says its 100 feet tall, but is that accurate? It is, after all, unwise to trust a movie poster. Robby the Robot never carried off Anne Francis in Forbidden Planet.
In the movie, we see the Tarantula pass over Dead Man’s Point, a famous rock formation in the Mojave close to the towns of Apple Valley and Lucerne Valley. Old westerns were sometimes filmed near Dead Man’s Point because it’s kind of cool looking. Dead Man’s Point got its name back in the 19th century when missionaries were ambushed and massacred by natives.
I guess they should call it Dead Men’s Point instead…
Here’s a pic of the Tarantula crawling over Dead Man’s Point:
Dead Man’s Point is 60 feet tall, which means the 100 feet given in the poster is accurate. If the tarantula straightens up a little…yeah I could see it being 100 feet.
The Tarantula’s Feats
–Was unharmed by a farmer’s shotgun. The farmer holding the shotgun was far less fortunate.
–Lift and threw a truck.
–Secreted pools worth of tarantula venom…which isn’t as impressive as it sounds. Even the movie points out that tarantula venom is relatively harmless. Bee venom is actually stronger than tarantula venom. Unless you have an allergic reaction, you’re fine if a tarantula bites you.
That being said, it’s probably at lot different if its an entire pool of venom…
–He (she?) destroyed a two story mansion by crawling over it.
–The Tarantula was able to gain on a speeding car.
–Was unharmed by machine gun fire from several state troopers.
–Was unharmed by an indeterminate amount of dynamite (the boxes they’re setting up in the Dead Man’s Point picture).
–Was Unharmed by 4 missiles fired at it by fighter squadron. The squadron fired more, but only four hit it (how the hell do you miss a giant tarantula?).
So Who Wins?
The Deadly Mantis makes the Tarantula dead.
See? It really is a deadly mantis.
It’s not a total blow out, because their durability and strength are very similar. They both can lift and throw vehicles. They both can smash buildings. They both shrug off machine gun fire and missiles. But the Mantis has a couple of advantages that get it over.
The Mantis can fly, the Tarantula can’t. The Mantis kept up with jets, the Tarantula could only keep up with cars. The Mantis took a flamethrower to the face and was fine, the Tarantula died from napalm. The Mantis is about 200 feet tall, the Tarantula only about 100 feet.
And, as weird as it sounds, the Mantis has an experience advantage. It’s from a lost world of giant creepy-crawlies. It probably had to fend off creatures similar to the Tarantula. But the Tarantula was just a tarantula–lower case and smaller than a bread box–until it got some acromegaly juice.
In real life, a tarantula would make lunch out of a praying mantis. But when it comes to a frozen mantis from a lost world and a tarantula used as an acromegaly science experiment, the Mantis preys on the Tarantula.
Music Track Name Ideas
C Rank: Creepy Crawlies
B Rank: Bug Out
A Rank: Insect Insurrection
S Rank: Bugs!
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