Didn’t most of the old-time “Giant Monster” movies get their effects by letting the real thing roam around on a miniature set and filmed really close up? That’s easy enough with spiders or grasshoppers, not so easy with mosquitoes.
Skeeter came out in 1993.
I just sprayed half a mouthful of perfectly good cider all over the deck. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for the laugh of the day! 
It’s funny because it’s true.
They’re Minnesota’s state bird. :mad:
The Monster That Challenged the World features giant mollusks coming out of the Salton Sea vs Hans Conried.
How about the made for T.V. movie Bug which features
large fire-starting cockroaches released by an earthquake.
I was going to say Mimic, but then remembered the Judas Breed were a termite-mantis mix.
Does Team America: World Police count for sentient roaches?
The circa 1960 Mars Attacks! cards weren’t fastidious about species, but DID feature several cards with Giant Insects attacking people. In particular, number 38, Victims of the Bug features a giant blood-sucking insect of some kind sticking an absurdly large proboscis into a soldier’s chest:
So mosquitos didn’t make it into the movies until pretty late, but they were in other media early enough.
Incidentally, there are plenty of huge mosquitos in folklore, much of it predating the 1950s Giant Bug craze. There was an Alaskan Tall Tale about an Air Corps crew that refueled a mosquito. even earlier is the Tuscarora legend of Great Father mosquito:
Well, there was 1957’s Attack of the Crab Monsters. A-bomb (of course) creates giant killer crabs. Pubes are infested bigly. Etc.
Although I might be mis-remembering something.
The Naked Jungle is still my favorite insect movie.
Charlton Heston battling vast armies of marauding ants, a sexy mail-order bride…what more could you ask?
Interesting flick, for several reasons:
1.) Produced by George Pal and Directed by Byron Haskin, both of whom did a lot of science fiction films (although this isn’t one)
2.) There had already been a radio adaptation of Leininger and the Ants (which this is based on), starring William Conrad. Conrad was a big name in radio acting, and had originated the role of Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke on the radio. Unfortunately, TV and movie execs thought he was too – uhh – portly to be considered a hero in visual media. So when Gunsmoke moved to the tube, James Arness got the role, with Conrad nowhere in sight. When they made The Naked Jungle, Charlton Heston got the lead. But at least Conrad got another role in the movie, this time.
3.) George Pal re-used some of the army any scenes in his flick Atlantis, the Lost Continent. They were scenes of the ants crossing streams. In Atlantis, I think they were supposed to show that the ants, like other animals, were fleing the doomed Atlantis, fated to sink. Although the mind boggles at the thought of army ants attempting to cross the OCEAN.
Not the only movie with giant crabs. (And it was a pretty stupid-looking one in this film, too. Whaddaya expect? It was a Corman film). There was a better Giant Crab in The Mysterious Island. There were better giant scorpions in The Black Scorpion (as well as in both versions of Clash of the Titans.
Attack of the Crab Monsters is also notable as yet another case where Russel Johnson played a scientist, just as in This Island Earth, Space Children, and two episodes of The Twilight Zone. You can see that the Universe was setting him up to play The Professor on Gilligan’s Island.
Surprisingly few, actually. Offhand, I can think of Tarantula and Beginning of the End that used that technique. The first is a pretty good movie. The second isn’t.
More common was the use of full-sized mechanical models, as in Them!, The Deadly Mantis, Attack of the Crab Monsters or The Monster that Challenged the World. Occasionally they used stop motion animation (The Black Scorpion), or a combination of stop motion and full-sized models (Monster from Green Hell).
Rodan had giant insect larvae that showed up in a mine, and were eventually eaten by the newly-hatched Rodan.
And speaking of kaiju films, what about the greatest Giant Insect of them all: Mothra?
Now you mention bug movies, just last week I watched Stung - movie about giant wasps.
Made as recently as 2015 it is OK, neither a good movie nor so rubbish it entertains as ‘car crash’ TV.
It has a slumming Lance Henrikson and the (minor novelty) of being set in America but actually filmed in Germany.
TCMF-2L
What’s wrong with just tossing a few grasshoppers onto a postcard?
Earth vs The Spider
Giant spider in a cave is knocked unconscious and brought to the local high school auditorium by the dumbest town-folk in history. Wakes up, escapes, lays waste to town, heads back to its home where it is ruthlessly murdered by the numb-nuts.
Wonderfully bad flick. It used a photographically blown-up Tarantula as its bad guy. The movie was effectively skewered on MST3K, one great line being "Gee, that Giant Spider is something, but look at what;'s over THERE!, said by the 'bots when the guys in the movie were supposed to be looking at the Spider, but the sight lines didn’t really line up with the SFX spider.
The poster for the movie said “It must eat you to Live!”
I’ve become more mellow towards such cheap flicks as I age. I now see how they did all sorts of things to save money – making the kids appear to be in a cave by matting in a couple of stalactites in a scene shot on a completely dark set, for instance.
I was impressed that they actually went to the trouble of making up a dessicated dummy to show the effect of the Spider draining the fluids out of somebody and, rather than lingering on it, the shot lasted only a fraction of a second onscreen. Here it is:
in any event, there were lots of flicks with insects and other beasties on miniature sets or photographically enlarged:
**Tarantula
Beginning of the End
Earth Vs. the Spider
Killers from Space
Have Rocket Will Travel
The Cosmic Monsters** (In Britain, it was “The Strange World of PLanet X”. I’m convinced that Stephen King stole “The Mist” from this film
**The Giant Gila Monster
King Dinosaur
Journey to the CEnter of the Earth
The Lost World** (Not just lizards – there’s Giant Spider, too. David Hedison gets to shoot it, thereby getting revenge for the end of “The Fly”)
I’m not including much later films (Like the much-derided Night of the Lepus). I observe that even he Ray Harryhausen film One Million Years B.C. has a shot of an enlarged lizard among the animated models, apparently to stretch out the budget.
The spider in The Incredible Shrinking Man still spooks me.
Yeah, the desiccated dummy sequence actually showed some film-making talent! Who’d’ve guessed? I think they used several different spiders: ISTR at one point it was almost totally white (gray?) and at the end, it wasn’t a tarantula at all (some hairless spider–it’s been a long time; I could be mistaken).
Tarantula is pretty darn good. And prophetic: when things go balls-up, you send in Clint Eastwood to take care of business.
And I’m actually impressed with the grasshopper effect at the end of Beginning of the End. Bad eyesight helps.
The Roger Corman film “The Nest” is about killer cockroaches which start normal sized but eventually mutate to dog sized.
The video games series Fallout also features giant insects mutated by post-nuclear war radiation, which include giant cockroaches, giant scorpions, giant mosquitos, giant wasps, giant flies, and giant mantises. If you ever wanted to take a tire iron to a scorpion the size of a car, this is your game.