A string of strange disappearances, killings, and sugar thefts in the New Mexico desert leaves the local authorities and FBI stymied, so a father-daughter tag team of scientists is called in to give their opinion. The two scientists have a theory, but refuse to share it until it’s been conclusively proven. The sudden arrival of a nine-foot carnivorous ant renders their silence moot, and the hunt is on to find and exterminate the nest of giant ants.
Once the nest is found and neutralized, the scientists realize that at least two young queens and their male consorts have already left to start their own colonies. Yet another hunt is on for the location of this new threat, tracking the fugitive queens as far as Texas and the California coast. The survival of mankind ultimately hinges on a final showdown of man vs. giant killer ant in the storm drains of Los Angeles.
Illustration copyright 2009 Dennis J. Reinmueller
Is it any good?
It’s a heckuva lot of fun. The movie is structured like a police procedural, so it moves along swiftly from clue to clue as the true nature of what’s happening becomes apparent. None of the characters (except possibly the father-daughter scientist team) are the least bit memorable -- but neither does the movie really ask you to care about any of them. There’s no paper-thin love story or family melodramas or even any fresh-faced army privates hoping to get home to their best girls. There’s literally nothing else besides a desperate search to find the giant killer ant nests before it’s too late.
The 1950s saw an awful lot of sci-fi movies of widely varying quality about giant animals -- mutated, prehistoric, or both. Like most of the best ones, THEM! doesn’t try to pass off cheapo rear-projected footage of real animals for monsters. All the giant ants here are life-size puppets with moving parts that often get shot full of holes or burned up by flamethrowers. I actually started to wonder how many ant puppets they had to build to make all the destruction possible. But even though the ants are not realistic (or mobile) enough to be really scary, the fact that they are big and real and able to interact with actors does make them creepy in a way that close-up shots of live ants never could be. The movie also makes the most of spooky ways of framing the ants or their shadows or evidence of their murderous rampage. Even though the puppets look pretty silly, it’s still chilling to see one dropping a picked-clean human rib cage among a pile of other bones and skulls.
If there’s any downside to the movie, it’s that the best part comes almost exactly halfway through when a small team of humans is exploring the ant nest in New Mexico to confirm that all the ants have been gassed to death. (Spoiler: They haven’t been!) The dead ants and gestating eggs that fill the nest are very eerie, and the whole sequence ends far too quickly. The scenes that follow of flags being pinned into maps and reports rolling off teletype machines somehow just don’t hold the same tension as a handful of humans penetrating a nest of giant ants to torch the egg chamber. There is another climactic hunt through the storm drains of Los Angeles at the end of the movie, but it’s not nearly as gripping as the first bit in the nest. Still, this is a thoroughly enjoyable and fast-paced giant monster movie.
What else happened this year?
-- Another giant animal that owes its existence to the atom bomb menaces a different major city in GOJIRA. For better or for worse, this was the first monster movie to forgo stop-motion or puppet effects in favor of the man-in-a-suit approach.
-- Universal introduced its last big monster movie franchise (and one of the best) in THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, originally shot and shown in 3-D.
-- Walt Disney’s 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA was also released this year. I’m not really a fan of any of his big budget, all-star sci-fi spectaculars, but this one is probably the best of the bunch thanks to a very likeable (and often shirtless) Kirk Douglas and a suitably misanthropic Captain Nemo played by James Mason.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1954...
You might as well make it GOJIRA, though you can’t steer too far wrong with THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON either.
When I was fourteen or so I found a book called The A to Z of Movie Monsters in the surprisingly well-stocked library of the small town I was living in. I remember this was one of the movies that really leaped out at me as something completely amazing and cool, and I spent years trying to find a copy (I'm still half-heartedly searching for Laserblast). It didn't disappoint. One of the parts that really sticks with me is the bit where the find the building with the front wall just torn clean out. That's good storytelling!
ReplyDeleteAlso I guess people have said it a million times, but this really is the leaping-off point for Aliens.
I really like that apparently they figured out it was giant ants, but realized no one would believe them. They didn't try and say it was ants; they had dignity about it, and by God they were gonna really fix everything if they could.
ReplyDeleteThen it was all moot.
That is pretty much exactly how it went.
ReplyDelete"Do you have a theory?"
"Yes."
"Can you share it?"
"No. We have to be sure."
"AAAAHHHH A GIANT ANT!!!"
"Yes... That confirms our theory. We think it's giant ants!"