Them! (1954)

Directed by: Gordon Douglas | 89 minutes | horror | Actors: James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn, Joan Weldon, James Arness, Onslow Stevens, Sean McClory, Chris Drake, Sandy Descher, Mary Ann Hokanson, Don Shelton, Fess Parker, Olin Howlin, Leonard Nimoy

This movie is one of the monster movies of the 50s of the twentieth century. The fear of the time about the consequences of the atomic age is expressed in this film by ants that have been exposed to radiation for years and have grown to a giant size as a result. The ants make the local area unsafe and here and there write various victims in their name. Then two ant queens fly out to build ant nests elsewhere, and so once again bleak times lie ahead for mankind.

What is striking is that the film starts strongly by not making the cause of the disaster clear for a long time, but only showing the consequences of their actions: devastation, victims and various inexplicable signs that something very strange is happening in the desert. haunts. Even when their near presence is clear by their howling howling sounds, their appearance remains out of the picture in an atmosphere-enhancing way: only the dune edge behind which they have to hide and the sandstorm that blows over the desert with the vaguely defined shapes and shadows therein are depicted. and this achieves a more oppressive atmosphere than if the doom spreaders were immediately brought into full view. Even in the first confrontations, only their whooping howls and the gunshots and screams of their victims are heard in an atmosphere-enhancing way. In addition, the threat posed by them is suitably magnified by only gradually revealing their evil qualities to humanity. The scientific explanation is often not lacking in these kinds of films and the fear of the ants is further fueled by film images of fighting ants with the statements that “…ants are savage, ruthless and courageous fighters.ants are the only creatures on earth other than man who make warsavagery that make man feeble by comparison…” Due to the gradual revelations about the danger in this film, the announcements about the nature and properties of the ants and their subsequent actual appearances along with several successful confrontations, the first part comes in the first part. of the film creates an appropriately oppressive atmosphere in which the threat posed by the ants is constantly palpable.

Over time, however, the film begins to sag somewhat and the momentum also loses. The threat posed by the ants fades too much into the background when attention is shifted to the search for the two queen ants that have fled elsewhere. An oppressive atmosphere is re-established after a while, because it turns out that the ants have made their nest in the sewers of Los Angeles and that the city is therefore living on a biological bomb that can erupt at any moment, but it takes a relatively long time occupied before this becomes clear and what imaginative confrontations with this and that ant would have been welcome at this stage of the film. In addition, the necessary question marks can be raised about the credibility of the ants in the sewers remaining undetected for months. In the desert this is plausible due to the desolation of the area, but this is very doubtful for the ants in the sewers, especially since several sewers are still under construction and the ants repeatedly forage through the streets at night. to call. The necessary humor in the second part of the film, which seems dated now, cannot disguise these negative points, although the final phase of the film compensates for a lot due to the successful various confrontations with the ants.

Remarkable is the not exactly true-to-life behavior of the ants. Though huge in size and terrifying enough to convey the appropriate threat, it’s clear that their size has come with some limitations. The appearances of the ants are not created by overlaying filmed images of real ants in an enlarged format over other film images of people running around in panic, but the ants here are clearly man-made artificial specimens. In view of the metres-long height and length of the artificial ants, their manufacture can be called a great achievement, but it does have the necessary consequences for their performance. They are only partially visible and in addition their lack of mobility and speed does not correspond to the image that the average viewer will have of the ant in general. Nevertheless, these points do not significantly affect the performance of the ants. In the confrontations that take place with the ants in their nests in the desert and in the sewers, it is only logical that there is no room in the narrow corridors to portray their entire appearance. In addition, in these scenes their grinding jaws, their howling howling and the poison they carry with them, in combination with the claustrophobic spaces in which the various confrontations take place, are more than enough to create an effectively threatening atmosphere, all the more so there. in the dark corridors danger can strike from all sides. There are also plenty of imaginative action scenes when the most diverse weaponry against the ants is used: pistols, rifles, machine guns, flamethrowers, bazookas, grenades with poison hurled at the ants, explosions of various kinds are these action scenes and the effective threat posed by the ants that their flawed performance and their clearly artificial appearance far exceeds this so that this is not experienced as an actual detriment to the film.

A film from the fifties of the twentieth century, in which the fear of the consequences of the atomic age is clearly visible and in which a few drawbacks can be identified. But the successful oppressive atmosphere that is present on several levels in most of the film and the menace and the imaginative confrontations of and with the ants, this is one of the better giant bug films from the 50s. Highly recommended for fans of the genre and horror movies in general.