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The early 1950s was the golden age of science fiction film. Between the UFO craze and Cold War-era nuclear jitters, Hollywood (and the UK) cranked out a pretty good array of sci-fi classics of varying quality. While it's easy to use Robot Monster as a brush to tar the entire era with, it's so easy to forget that many of our most beloved science fiction and horror works of the 1970s and 1980s were created by people who grew up watching shit like The Day the Earth Stood Still as kids. And it's certainly no secret, if you know me at all, that Alien and Aliens rank among my favorite movies of all time, but even I didn't realize just how much they built on ground seeded by Gordon Douglas' 1954 kaiju classic Them!
I admit it: I wasn't expecting much when I came in. While the era is littered with classics, a lot of those classics are classics in spite of themselves. But Them! has an ominous tone right from the jump, as a police patrol in the New Mexico desert search for a wandering child spotted by a passerby. Upon finding her, she's unresponsive, but not far away is her family's campsite, mysteriously torn apart. A general store nearby has been ransacked and its owner murdered in a bizarre fashion: enough formic acid to kill twenty men. The police sergeant's young partner disappears. Soon, a pair of scientists from the USDA arrive with a novel theory: nuclear testing from nearby Los Alamos has mutated a local ant species into growing to gargantuan size, and should they manage to spread to new nests elsewhere, all of humanity could be at risk.
It's a silly idea on its face, especially given the square-cube law dictating that such creatures should by no means be able to survive. But this is science fiction, and atomic energy can be used to explain just about anything. Even better, Them! is no mere monster mash: much of the film is treated as a detective story, as the government rushes to find the new nests and squash them before they can propagate again. The nest scenes themselves are fantastically claustrophobic, complete with flamethrowers and automatic weapons; you half expect someone to say "check those corners."
Them! is one of those perfect films. Fantastically shot and edited, with some great actors including none other than James Arness (showing off his acting chops after his more monstrous role in The Thing From Another World) and a razor-sharp tension throughout. We're treated to incredible scenes like the giant ant cresting the ridge behind the oblivious female lead, as well as the deliciously nightmarish climax in the ant hive deep in the storm drains beneath Los Angeles. There's an almost apocalyptic vibe to the film, a race against time before mankind's own hubris catches up to us in the form of monstrous creatures formed by monstrous science. It's a fantastic movie all around, one of the earliest giant monster movies of the 1950s and even beating Godzilla to theaters by a solid four months. If you're at all a fan of Aliens, you owe it to yourself to dig up a copy of Them!
And maybe put down some ant traps.
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