Overall: WOOF
B-movie peddler Bert I. Gordon started off his directorial career with King Dinosaur; a movie bad enough to make one seriously ponder how he ever was allowed behind the lens again. Not that the abysmal results of the film are entirely Gordon's fault as it was shot in seven days and he is working with a completely inadequate budget even for the standards of drive-in schlock from the era. The dopey story involves a new planet that just strolls on into Earth's atmosphere shortly into the future, which gives the excuse for four no-name Caucasian actors to travel there to see if it is inhabitable. Said characters spend about forty minutes doing so with no sense of urgency before the not-so-special effects showcases start involving split screen shots of iguanas and armadillos that stand-in for prehistoric monsters. This tactic goes all the way back to the silent era and was still used decades later for anything that could not afford a stop-motion crew for more stylized results, but it of course comes off as ridiculous when we are supposed to be afraid of a "Tyrannosaurus Rex" that is clearly just a common house lizard. The movie's underwhelming visuals are hardly the biggest faux pas though as the movie is atrociously boring despite all of the stock footage of atomic bombs and woolly mammoths meant to distract you. 
BEGINNING OF THE END(1957)
Overall: MEH
One of the many cheaply made, giant insect cash-grabs that was churned out in the 1950s, Beginning of the End is no better or worse than the most forgettable of them. Speaking of Them!, the film was tailor-made to rehash the same basic concept and threat, this time being over-sized locusts instead of ants that start terrorizing the Illinois countryside. They eventually make their way to Chicago where no military weapons can stop them, (well, besides the few times that they do), and Peter "Ever seen a grown man naked?" Graves concocts a plan to lure all of the pesky bugs into Lake Michigan by way of an artificial mating call. The movie opens with an eerie concept of an entire town being destroyed and all of its inhabitants having vanished into thin air, but things quickly become formulaic after that with characters making fully-fledged conclusions in the blink of an eye and reverting to the usual desperation attempt to just drop a bomb on the problem, which is in keeping with every other science fiction and/or disaster movie from the period that played stereotypically into Cold War fear tactics. Director Bert I. Gordon supplied his own special effects which utilize the same split screen and rear projection that produced equally awful results in his previous King Dinosaur crud rock, but at least there is plenty of such grasshopper mayhem on display to laugh at. 
THE CYCLOPS(1957)
Overall: MEH
Though writer/director/producer Bert I. Gordon's third feature The Cyclops includes a good amount of screen time for an, (allegedly), aggressively drunk Lon Chaney Jr., it also includes the worst special effects yet in any of the filmmaker's movies thus far. For bottom-barrel budgetary reasons, Gordon is still forced to use rear projection and primitive matte work in order to put the regular sized characters on the same screen with the title monster, as well as overgrown insects and reptiles. The results are embarrassing to say the least, but they do provide the movie with some much needed, accidental hoots along with Chaney's particularly sweaty and jacked-up performance. Gordon's script is bare-bones and still has moments of monotony, particularly during the first half when the four lone characters keep having the same argument as to when they should leave the desolate, Mexican desert after finding it rich with uranium. That said, there are a good amount of the aforementioned, unintentionally funny giant animal sequences regularly thrown in before Duncan Parkin becomes the main attraction playing essentially the same bald, scantily-clad, mindless brute that he would likewise portray in Gordon's War of the Colossal Beast the following year. At only sixty-six minutes long, it does not overstay its welcome as it easily still could have, but its dopey, D-rent production values undermine it all the same.
Overall: MEH
One of the many cheaply made, giant insect cash-grabs that was churned out in the 1950s, Beginning of the End is no better or worse than the most forgettable of them. Speaking of Them!, the film was tailor-made to rehash the same basic concept and threat, this time being over-sized locusts instead of ants that start terrorizing the Illinois countryside. They eventually make their way to Chicago where no military weapons can stop them, (well, besides the few times that they do), and Peter "Ever seen a grown man naked?" Graves concocts a plan to lure all of the pesky bugs into Lake Michigan by way of an artificial mating call. The movie opens with an eerie concept of an entire town being destroyed and all of its inhabitants having vanished into thin air, but things quickly become formulaic after that with characters making fully-fledged conclusions in the blink of an eye and reverting to the usual desperation attempt to just drop a bomb on the problem, which is in keeping with every other science fiction and/or disaster movie from the period that played stereotypically into Cold War fear tactics. Director Bert I. Gordon supplied his own special effects which utilize the same split screen and rear projection that produced equally awful results in his previous King Dinosaur crud rock, but at least there is plenty of such grasshopper mayhem on display to laugh at.
Overall: MEH
Though writer/director/producer Bert I. Gordon's third feature The Cyclops includes a good amount of screen time for an, (allegedly), aggressively drunk Lon Chaney Jr., it also includes the worst special effects yet in any of the filmmaker's movies thus far. For bottom-barrel budgetary reasons, Gordon is still forced to use rear projection and primitive matte work in order to put the regular sized characters on the same screen with the title monster, as well as overgrown insects and reptiles. The results are embarrassing to say the least, but they do provide the movie with some much needed, accidental hoots along with Chaney's particularly sweaty and jacked-up performance. Gordon's script is bare-bones and still has moments of monotony, particularly during the first half when the four lone characters keep having the same argument as to when they should leave the desolate, Mexican desert after finding it rich with uranium. That said, there are a good amount of the aforementioned, unintentionally funny giant animal sequences regularly thrown in before Duncan Parkin becomes the main attraction playing essentially the same bald, scantily-clad, mindless brute that he would likewise portray in Gordon's War of the Colossal Beast the following year. At only sixty-six minutes long, it does not overstay its welcome as it easily still could have, but its dopey, D-rent production values undermine it all the same.
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