Cinema Sunday: THEM!

Today, Cinema Sunday continues to look at classic sci-fi with the 1954 black-and-white film known as...

THEM! 

It's humanity vs. ants!

These insect critters? 

Well, no big deal! Just break out a can of Raid and...

No! 

This kind of ant...

Well....

Shit!  

The film begins quietly and ominously as New Mexico state troopers  find a little girl wandering the desert, catatonic in a state of shock.

The troopers backtrack where the girl came from, a now destroyed trailer home. 

The eerie quiet of the desert is broken by a strange pulsating sound. 

After an ambulance takes the little girl to the hospital, the troopers arrive at a general store to find the owner dead and a wall torn out.  

One of the troopers stays behind at the store to secure the crime scene. Then there is that strange pulsating sound, the police officer reacts in terror as he fires his gun at an unseen advancing assailant. He will not survive the encounter. 

Well, there is some weird shit going down in the desert of New Mexico. It warrants a visit from an FBI special agent and from the Department of Agriculture, a pair of myrmecologists.

Let's get educational!  

Myrmecologists are people who study ants. 

What the hell? Ant experts? Why? 

Because all the signs at the crime scenes suggest that the  perpetrators of all this death and destruction are...

Roadrunners! Beep! Beep! 

No, dammit! Ants! 

GIANT ANTS!!!!

Seems some recent atom bomb tests in the New Mexico desert has royally fucked with ant DNA and now they're big. 

Big as horses! 

Big as cars!! 

Big as houses!!!

Big as.... as.... oh, fuck it! They're BIG!  

The army shows up with big guns, flame throwers and gas bombs and the threat of the giant ants is resolved for---

Uh oh! 

Two giant ant queens have escaped and made their way to Los Angeles. They think they've got a shot at being movie stars.

Or at least a guest spot on Ru Paul's Drag Race.  

OK, it's time for HOT PURSUIT! Going after the giant ants is the US Army, the FBI, myrmecologists and a New Mexico state trooper because hell, why not? 

The pursuit of the giant ants culminates in a pitch battle in the  concrete spillways and storm drain system of Los Angeles. People will die! 

SPOILER: it's NOT the myrmecologists.  

In fact, the older of the two myrmecologists gives the final monologue and the moral of the film:   "When Man entered the Atomic Age, he opened the door to a new world. What we may eventually find in that new world, nobody can predict."

Translation: "Science can fuck you up."  

The "It's That Person Who Was In That Thing" Department

James Arness is the FBI agent which is weird seeing him as someone other than Marshall Dillon in Gunsmoke.  

Leonard Nimoy has a "blink and you'll miss it" uncredited part as a U.S. Army staff sergeant in the communications room.

William Schallert, that unsufferable prick from "The Trouble With Tribbles", pops in for a bit.  

While THEM! was a black and white movie, the title card for the film is in color.  

The Wilhelm scream is used during the action sequences, twice when people are caught in the murderous mandibles of the gargantuan ants.   

Friends connection:  Joey and Chandler watch the film on TV in the 1995 Friends episode "The One Where Rachel and Ross... You Know".

You know... eaten by giant ants.  

OK, I've had some fun recounting some of what happens in THEM! but it is a surprisingly good film with solid performances and intelligent writing. Yeah, we're playing fast and loose with science but within the world of this film, the process of discovering and then destroying the giant ants is handled with a deliberate internal logic.     

THEM! remains after all these years the pinnacle of films about giant ants!