150 Word Review: 'Them!' (1954)
Ant, man-eating
The movie opens on a traumatized girl walking through the bleak New Mexico desert—something tore her parents apart. It climaxes with a battle between flamethrowers and gigantic mutant ants in the storm sewers of Los Angeles.
Them! is a 1954 black-and-white sci-fi horror directed by Gordon Douglas that asks the question: maybe America shouldn't have tested so many atomic bombs in the Southwest? It's brisk and gruesome. The mechanical ants are impressive mega-puppets. The sound design unnerves.
The cast is overqualified: James Whitmore plays a heroic cop, Joan Weldon is a fearless scientist. Edmund Gwenn stands out as a monster expert who delivers dire warnings with understated seriousness.
I once watched Them! as a kid when TV had just a few channels and late-night programming was for weirdos. This one scene gave me a nightmare: a human ribcage caught in the massive scissors-like mandibles of a screeching radioactive ant.
GIFs That Keep On Giving
Them! Is probably the best of the big creature films of the 50s. I hope I get to watch it on the big screen someday.
It's a good movie! It does a really good job of starting small and scaling up. (I watched it after first hearing about on John Rogers blog: https://kfmonkey.blogspot.com/2010/06/netflix-friday-10-them.html )