Them!

By Zentilack

Summary

New Mexico policeman Ben Peterson (James Whitmore) stumbles onto a series of curious events which end in several deaths.  FBI agent Robert Graham (James Arness) is called in to assist, but things turn really bad when they discover the true threat of Them!

What I Expected

I'd never seen this movie, though I'd heard plenty about it.  It's a big name in the giant mutated animal/insect genre, and there have been tons of references to it through the years.  A lot, I know that I didn't get at the time.  Other references were a bit more obvious...

Knowing that it's a 1950's monster movie I really didn't expect much as far as a serious plot or special effects go.  I thought it would be, at best, something I could laugh at and enjoy while eating my popcorn.  At worst, I expected something that was only a little bit too good for the Mystery Science Theater guys to riff on.  Either way, my expectations were fairly low.

The Bad

I hesitate to put the ants themselves in this category, because for 1954 they looked really, really good.  In fact, Them! was Oscar nominated for it's special effects (loosing to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea).  At the same time, I'm watching this over fifty years later.  As fair as I want to be to the movie, the ants are just a little bit stiff and lifeless to me.

As far as some of the acting goes, I'm not sure if some of the actors were bad or if the story just called for an out of place character.  I guess having a goofy drunken guy in your movie was a thing back then.  Still, when you're trying to set a serious, precipice-of-disaster kind of tone, why would you put in a crazy wino singing, "Make me a sergeant in charge of the booze!  Make me a sergeant in charge of the booze!" and ruin the whole atmosphere?

Wilhelm Scream out the wazoo.  Seriously, I heard it at least three times.  Even one of the main characters does it when he's attacked!  It's kinda neat when you hear it in a movie, but three times in the same film?  Too much Wilhelm.  For those who are unfamiliar with the term, give a listen to the original scream and you'll recognize it.

Finally, the plot point around which the movie turns.  Radiation from the first atomic bomb test is what mutated the ants to giant size.  I know that this was made less than ten years after the Trinity test, and people still didn't know much about nuclear fission, but I have a hard time swallowing this.  So much time is taken to detail the hows and whys of the ant behavior but their origin is so silly.  Maybe if I'd lived in a time devoid of a million other "radiation causes superpowers" stories that have come out since the 50's.

Then again, I'm looking for a realistic explanation from a movie about ten foot long ants. Maybe if I look at it like a vampire flick? Dracula exists, let's just go from there.  Giant ants exist, enjoy your movie.

The Good

Honestly, I was surprised by how much suspense there was in Them!.  The opening slowly builds the tension and it's not until the 28 minute mark that you actually see your first giant ant.  The tone is solid throughout the movie, save for the occasional moment like the afore mentioned goofy drunk guy.  A couple of the scenes were genuinely suspenseful and I wondered, "How is this going to turn out?"  I thought this was supposed to be a corny, 1950's B-Movie?

The ants themselves look pretty good, to be honest.  The movements, as I said before, are pretty stiff and it's hard to accept them as real.  But if there had been better animatronics back in 1954, they would have been amazing (even by today's standards).  I think one of the best parts is when the ants get on board a ship and there's a guy frantically trying to send out a message on the telegraph while the silhouettes of his friends getting killed can be seen behind him.  Suddenly an ant bursts through the wall and catches him in it's mandibles.  It just looks awesome.  The ant sounds are suitably alien and strange to the ear (though they do tend to grate on you by the end of the film).

The main cast is solid with some fairly well known actors filling out the roles.  I knew James Whitmore as the man who played Admiral Bull Halsey in Tora! Tora! Tora!.  A year after Them!, James Arness would take on the lead character of Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke, a television series that continued for twenty years!  The character of Dr. Harold Medford, the ant specialist of the movie, was played by Edmund Gwenn, best known as Kris Kringle from the original Miracle on 34th Street.

Even the folks who only had one or two lines had quirks and mannerisms that made them feel like real people.  When a woman's husband is killed by Them and her boys are missing, she tries to help the heroes by trying to figure out where exactly they might have been attacked.  She talks about how the husband would take their kids to play at locations all over the city, but she begins to loose it as she remembers how irritated she would get that those places always seemed to bring them home covered in dirt.  Her acting wasn't as overblown as one would expect of a movie from this era.  Heck, it was pretty good even by today's standards.

Aside from the concept that nuclear radiation mutated the ants to super size, the film, as far as I can tell, did a pretty good job of sticking to actual science.  Even the smell of the ants is described as being that of formic acid, the stuff in many bee and ant stings (though, admittedly, I have no idea what formic acid would smell like).  This layer of realism goes a long way to cover up the irradiated super-ants premise.

Now, let us address the satisfaction element in Them!.  We all know that ants are terrible and they all deserve death.  Ants irritate me to no end.  I've been bitten so many times, I've seen electrical cords chewed through by them, I fell in the backyard while playing and apparently landed my head in an ant bed (that was an experience...).  The only way they could be worse is if they spread the plague.  The point is, we all want ants to die, and die they do in Them!.  In this movie they are shot, gassed, exploded and burned.  They all die.  This is a huge point in the movie's favor, as far as I'm concerned.  If you hate ants the way I do, you're gonna love the ant body-count here.

Final Thoughts

Them! is the prototype giant creature movie, one of the first.  Many of the cliches of the genre had their start here.  And you know what?  It's brilliant.  Most of you out there who are fans of this sort of movie have probably already seen it (if you haven't, do so).  But those of you who aren't big fans of the genre?  I still recommend it.  This is known as a classic, and now I can understand why.  If you ever get a chance to give Them! a watch, take it.  This isn't really a horror movie in the way we think of them today.  Think of it as less of a horror and more of a suspense movie and you might just get into it enough to like it.

Them! is, as of now, on Instant Netflix, but will be removed in a few days.  It can be found as part of a DVD four-pack bundle on Amazon for around $10.