Another 1950s flick full of scientists, screaming women and a screeching beast. It’s the usual stuff, but this time the monster is a giant praying mantis, a prehistoric anomaly frozen in the Arctic and freed by a volcano blast. Now it’s out and about, eating up radar stations, flipping over cars and eventually going sightseeing in Washington DC, where it crawls up the Washington Monument like it’s a blade of grass, and then New York City, where maybe the mantis hopes to check out a Broadway show or something before the science guys finally figure out how to kill it. This suffers from the same talky stretches and the half-assed romance subplot that you usually have to deal with in these movies, but it fairly breezes by in a cool seventy-eight minutes. It’s hard to muster up any emotion about it. The best thing here: the mantis itself is one of the best looking creatures of the time, an imposing hard-shelled insect with big, dead eyes and whipping forelegs.