Here is the link to our article, The Cringing Arghh!" from our wonderful friends at the emagazine Eerie Digest: http://www.eeriedigest.com/wordpress/2012/09/the-cringing-aarghh-by-guest-authors-james-f-john-m-gaines/

It deals with the way sci fi movies have treated the reaction of terror and speaks, among other films, of this early Peter Graves/Bert I. Gordon product, "The Beginning of the End."  It is certainly not the only sci fi film to feature the "giant bugs" that Bela Lugosi (Martin Landau) bemoans in "Ed Wood," but it is the only one we can cite off-hand where the culprits are grasshoppers and the apocalyptic battle takes place on a postcard of Chicago's Wrigley Building.  None of the grasshoppers in the film are armed with the teeth you see in the poster, but instead sport their natural, very active mouth parts.  MST3000 provides a wonderful rifftrack that fails to hide some of the Minneapolis-based MST staff's pet peeves about the Windy City.  In most ways the film is short on science and everything else except sheer fun, but it does cause us to speculate about how the constantly present and constantly stifled nuclear terrors of the 50's and 60's may have incited people both to scream and to laugh in an effort to preserve their sanity in an officially ultra-controlled but really out-of-control world.