This scorpion is so huge it brings down a helicopter in the coliseum where the army confronts it at the end. A scene in the final act where the scorpions attack a train, derailing it and plucking flailing passengers out to eat, and the final confrontation with the lone black scorpion, the huge mother encountered in the cavern and the same one who goes rogue during the train derailment and kills off his buddies. There are two other exciting sequences as well. It’s a creepy section of the movie that shows us the scorpions attacking and feeding on a tentacled worm-like beast, and this annoying kid stowaway being chased by a thing that appears to be a cross between a beetle, a spider and a crab, and makes weird sounds as it scuttles around. The best sequence is the exploration of the cavern, where O’Brien’s effects shine the best. In the last few days people have gone missing and cattle have been killed, our three heroes finally find out it’s giant scorpions when the damn things attack Teresa’s ranch for the cattle, then the locals in the nearby town, and then two telephone repair men. What you can’t see is all the slime and drool. This is the only practical in-camera scorpion effect, this is what they look like up close. They eventually find the body of the officer and take it back for examination only to find he has a hole in the base of his neck and is loaded with poison. ![]() Arturo Ramos (Carlos Rivas), are there to study it, but are presented by a mystery involving the weird sounds the giant ants from Them! (1954) make (these scorpions even roar), a missing police-man and a police car that appears to be trashed in a way no earthquake would trash a police car. Scott and his other Geology Professor buddy, Dr. This takes place down in Mexico in the wake of an earthquake what everyone’s going to soon find out is deep within a nearby volcano the quake has opened up a fissure to a hidden cavern teeming with giant scorpions and other freaky looking creepy crawlers from prehistory. The movie stars Mara Corday (previously seen in two other “nature run amok” flicks, 1955’s Tarantula and 1957’s The Giant Claw) and Richard Denning, of Creature From The Black Lagoon (1954) fame as rancher Teresa Alvarez and Geology Professor Dr. His original design is below the retail box covers! Every time we went to the store I would spend some time in the model kit aisle looking at the boxes. Famed artist, Syd Mead, designed the art for those two. The two that made the most impression on me were the scorpion and the mantis due to the artwork. I so wanted them, but my mother wouldn’t buy any model kits that had to be glued together, because that meant my father would have to put them together, apparently he didn’t like the ones that needed glue, and wouldn’t you know it these Gigantics required glue. That was back when I was in my late 20s, obviously my opinion has changed in the intervening years, thanks to repeated viewings on TCM.Īnother great memory I have from the early 70s are the “Gigantics” model kits from Fundimension! There were four of them, a giant tarantula, scorpion, mantis and wasp! I remember coming across them at a local retail store in the toy department. ![]() I loved Willis O’Brien’s stop motion effects, but was bored by the story and characters. I’m afraid to say, at that time, the movie didn’t ‘whelm’ me at all. You know, I never even knew there was a giant scorpion movie in existence until I got older, and didn’t end up finally seeing it until the late 90s, when I bought the VHS. There was a giant wasp movie called, Monster From Green Hell (1957), that I was aware of but never wanted to see because I saw a photo of the giant wasps in a monster movie book once and they looked incredibly lame. This is probably the only “Big Bug” movie from the 50s I never saw when I was a kid. ![]() Home Entertainment provided me with a free copy of the blu-ray I reviewed in this article.
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