Them!

Probably the best film of its kind, whose perfectly constructed opening sequence in the Texas desert literally sends chills down the spine (the terrified mute girl is a masterpiece), and the rest of the footage constantly surprises with original techniques and changes of location. The only issue I see is that the scheme, which is varied twice in a row and culminates with scenes from the ants' lair, loses its original charge and energy for the second time. Anyway, if you want to see a typical representative of a complexly mastered monster movie that starts with an attack on a caravan and in the finale deals with a transnational crisis and context, Them! is the right choice for a nice cinephile evening by candlelight. (03.12.2017)

Poster tagline: A HORROR HORDE OF CRAWL-AND-CRASH GIANTS CLAWING OUT OF THE EARTH FROM MILE-DEEP CATACOMBS! An almost perfect monster-movie. Sure, the plot is not surprising, it follows the classic genre template, where you must have a distracted scientist, a beautiful, cunning biologist and a cute FBI investigator, giant ants mutated by radioactivity, bullshit about biblical doom, etc. But the form, that’s perfect. An eye-pleasing high-budget film, unadorned by anything, with impressive desert landscapes without any dull rear projections with live ants, but beautiful larger-than-life animatronic models. Of course, taken with today's eye, we have to look at the ant models with detachment, but try to read a few reviews on IMDB, where people confide how it scared them at the time – for example the scene when the ant spits out the ribs of the killed policeman was a nightmare for the ages. Otherwise the plot has a nice pace, we meet the ants soon after the beginning; the scenes with the bazooka and the flamethrower are specially nice, and during the "grilling" of the nest full of ant larvae it’s impossible not to remember Sigourney Weaver in Cameron's Aliens. It’s a pity that in the last act the film slows down and turns into a kind of a detective story with many interrogations, when the search is on to find out where the ant mothers could have disappeared from the desert. But the final carnage makes up for everything, and the anti-atomic agitprop at the end is not to be missed either. (06.05.2008)

This sweetly naive anti-agitprop of the American nuclear program desperately lacks a sharper push in the main aspect, the overgrown ants, of which there are woefully few for an average runtime, although the artwork is impressive even decades later. The ants’ their squealing doesn’t stop the audience's hearts like it did in 1954, but the interplay of machine guns, flamethrowers, and grenades is much more so dead weight in the form of tired dialogue and technical lectures on the subject of "ants." For once, the fear of crowd panic, the distraction of intrusive journalists, or some sort of development of the relationship between the racy biologist and the shrewd fed does not come to fruition. Without a dose of these (for the genre) necessary clichés, the film was not destined to be more than an average monster movie that is neither thrilling nor entertaining. This A-grade production (technically, the film is one of the highlights of the era) should have been directed by someone more sophisticated, thus making it a cult "guilty pleasure" hit! Unfortunate. (29.10.2006)

A disaster movie from the 1950s about an attack of giant ants that mutated after an atomic bomb test. The story and the characters are laughably naive (which isn’t bad for this type of movie, quite the opposite), but the execution is surprisingly good – A level. You don’t get to enjoy the ants too much, they show up only for a couple of minutes and, to my great surprise, when they do, the don’t look as funny as I expected. Thumbs up, but there’s no doubt that there’s nobody today who would enjoy this move as sci-fi horror (as they did back in 50s). (31.01.2012)

Produced in response to the success of the blockbuster The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Them! is the first movie about a big mutant insect. It’s a reasonably well-made big-budget movie about giant ants that very much foreshadows James Cameron and his Aliens (underground catacombs + eggs + flamethrowers). But beware! Them! is no horror movie about giant ants eating people. It’s a detective movie about people searching for a nest of giant ants. The few scenes with the ants themselves are disappointing, but the lively camerawork, the constant changing of location and the fast-paced plot are pleasing. (13.11.2002)