Them! (1954)

1954

Directed by Gordon Douglas
Starring James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn, Joan Weldon and James Arness

Longtime readers of the blog know one unequivocal fact: I am f**king terrified of insects.  Seriously, the damn things are the stuff of nightmares for me.  I've had some incidents with them over the years going all the way back to my childhood fear of grasshoppers (yes, seriously), including being frozen in fear for something like five minutes one time when a winged grasshopper flew into my car.  I'm well aware of the irony.  Nerdy blog horror guy can watch people get sliced up and go right to sleep immediately afterward, but bugs?  Yeah, keep them away.

As such, I knew that Them! was going to be a damn scary movie for yours truly before I even hit the "play" button.  I heard of this flick many years ago, back when I used to read every book about classic horror that my middle school library had.  The page-long spread in one of them about...um...Them! stood out immediately.  Out of all insects, ants are truly some of the most amazing, aren't they?  They can lift 20 times their body weight, they have a complex social structure, and they just seem to possess this weird intelligence that makes them slightly unnerving.  Throw these critters into an O.G. 1950s-style creature feature complete with the always great "nuclear testing makes something grow to Brobdingnagian proportions" plot, and you've got a winner.  Watching the story unfold, I also noticed several things that were later ripped off in James Cameron's Aliens, which we'll get to...RIGHT NOW!

This is a film that got plenty of critical praise at the time it was released, and it's easy to see why since the script here wastes precious little time building this palpable sense of dread.  A helicopter pilot is out cruising a lonely beat in the Mexico desert when they spot a lone little girl wandering around.  Sergeant Ben Peterson (James Whitmore, who is aces as the "everyman forced to be a hero" character) and his partner Ed Blackburn (Chris Drake) are on the scene to pick her up, and what they find is a child unable to speak, terrified into silence at whatever she has witnessed.  The girl is played by Sandy Descher, and while her role in this movie is brief, she makes an indelible impression - so much that it's easy to see why Cameron chose to ape this plot device with Newt in the aforementioned Aliens.  This sequence eventually leads to the discovery of two busted-up buildings, the latter of the two the site of a shootout between Ed and an unseen assailant that gives us our first offscreen screaming death.

Flash forward right along in our Screenwriting 101 lesson, as the film then introduces us to the rest of our main characters.  There's FBI agent Robert Graham (James Arness of Gunsmoke and my dad's favorite actor of all time fame) who fills in the "somewhat officious nice guy" role.  But then there's the real stars of this shindig, the antologists - Dr. Harold Medford (Edmund Gwenn) and his daughter Pat (Joan Weldon).  They give us some more dread as they share what their specialty is, and they are present when Ben and Robert go scouting the desert for whatever it is that's killing a whole bunch of seemingly random people for no reason.  Yeah, there's hints of romantic tension between Robert and Pat that pretty much goes nowhere, but just ignore that plot thread.  Eventually, Pat walks up that hill as she hears the curious sound that has been playing at various intervals throughout the film thus far and sees...it.  A giant freaking ant.

Amazingly enough, the creature effects still look pretty good more than sixty years later.  I'm a broken record when it comes to this subject, but here we go again: hand-made effects are 17 times as effective as CGI, because when it's done right it looks like it actually MIGHT be real, as compared to Michael Bay's goddamn crayola drawings, which just look like goddamn crayola drawings.  For its time period, Them! had a big budget to work with, and it's a good thing because the ants are onscreen quite a bit from this point in the movie forward.  Medford gives us the requisite science lessons that accompany the events and attack scenes, explaining that this desert was the site of the very first nuclear test a decade earlier.  Yup, we tampered in God's domain, or something.

The pace in this movie is brisk, and all of the big set pieces fire along in a slam-bang way.  We go from the ants' nesting site in the desert (and man, that sequence was nothing short of gut-wrenchingly tense for this guy) to an offshore ocean liner to the canals underneath Los Angeles.  There's a lot of yelling, a lot of politicians wondering how the hell they're going to keep 30-foot ants under wraps, and a lot of machine gun fire.  There's really a lot of that.  The finale takes place with the ants threatening to colonize L.A., and as I type this I'm actually feeling trepidation imagining such a thing happening under my small Minnesota town.  Ick.  And yes, folks, I was into the climactic scenes of this movie.

The writers here did a great job with both main things they set out to do.  First, they wanted to create a likable group of main characters, and this is a really memorable bunch.  Peterson has the emotional stakes of trying to avenge the death of his state trooper understudy, while both Medford and his daughter serve as the representatives of science doing their best to use their intellect to save mankind.  Because if these bugs manage to make a decent amount of colonies, it's the end of civilization.  Yet more nightmare fuel.  These likable characters lead us into goal #2, as we get more than a few truly cringe-worthy moments with these characters in peril.  The first reveal of the scout ant in the desert with Pat coming face-to-face with those mandibles...don't even get me started.  But then again, I don't know many other people besides myself who avoid knocking over anthills at all costs because they're worried that they'll sneak into your bedroom and kill you at night, so your mileage might vary.  And folks, I wish I was making that up.

While I greatly enjoyed pretty much everything this film had to offer, I will admit that it does lose some of its steam in the second half.  I think the movie would have been damn near perfect had they just confined the entire story to the remote New Mexico population and the vast desert, ending with the long, slow descent into the colony and coming face-to-face with the queen (a scene that we do get, and yet another thing that Cameron would later xerox).  Once the bugs start hitting different locations, the tension kind of dissipates, in no small part due to the fact that we are then introduced to a bunch of government officials that I couldn't have possibly cared less about.  I also think they should have kept the terrified mute girl around longer in the story than they did.  Hey, I never said that Cameron didn't do a GOOD job ripping this movie off!

Those flaws, though, are very minor.  If you like good 1950s-era acting and special effects and you're scared of bugs like I am, odds are you'll really enjoy this movie.  *** 1/2 out of ****.  And you can bet your ass I ain't watching this one again.