I just had LASIK done today so I wanted to watch something bright and vivid with my new eyesight, but instead I stumbled upon this black and white creature feature that I could not resist clicking on...
A genre that has always interested me that I've never really explored is 1950's sci-fi. Many of the titles are well known such as The Thing, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Forbidden Planet, War of the Worlds, and Creature from the Black Lagoon, yet I haven't seen a single one. I suppose part of it is that many of these movies just look really bad with their absurd premises, cheesy special effects and campy production. It requires a special type of audience and mood to intentionally watch a movie about fifty foot tarantulas that look like stuffed animals, although I did watch Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus, so I guess have no excuses. But then again, why not watch a movie about gigantic killer insects? It's really no more absurd than Cowboys vs. Aliens, a movie I was excited to see specifically because of how silly it sounded. So I stumbled upon Them!, a movie I've never even heard of. After looking around a bit, I found out that it was regarded as one of the better creature features of the time and also has a 100% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Sold.
The film opens up rather mysteriously. A cop car is patrolling the desert and finds a little girl wandering by herself in apparent shock unable to speak. The police officers locate the trailer home she lives in only to find it torn to pieces with only a mysterious print in the sand. Later they find a man dead in his store, a shotgun bent in half nearby. Who or what could possibly do such a thing? When the little girl finally comes out of her comatose state, she screams out hysterically, "Them!" Dun-dun-dun! The film works like many other good monster movies, building up the mystery and suspense, leaving the unknown lingering for the audience to grasp at. (In Super 8, JJ Abrams's homage to the genre, the creature is hidden throughout most of the film.) In this film we don't catch the first glimpse of "them" until over twenty minutes in.
So, who does "them" refer to in the movie? Ten foot tall mutated ants. There, it's out in the open. I figure there are two types of people in this world, those that want to see teen foot tall ants in a movie and those that do not. More specifically regarding these old school sci-fi films, you have to accept these amateurish looking creatures as real and go with the flow or you simply won't get into the movie. If all you see are the cheesy effects, then Them! and every other film from this period will be exactly what you thought they were, lousy low rate B films.
I think that is where modern audiences have been spoiled by today's special effects. Today you can create entire scenes through CGI like in Transformers leaving nothing to the imagination. We expect things to be done for us, to look as real as possible, otherwise we won't believe what we are seeing. Back then monsters had to be played by real people in costumes like in Beauty and the Beast, often times looking obviously fake, but it allowed viewers to watch with a sense of wonderment and the willingness to be told a fantasy. I am typically much more captivated by the special effects of an older film like Wizard of Oz than a modern film like The Lord of the Rings perhaps for this reason. And who is to say that today's effects are necessarily even better? There has been an ongoing war within the Star Wars community regarding George Lucas's revision of the franchise particularly in introducing modern special effects to the original films. Many people prefer the older "inferior" looks and effects.
For what it's worth, the ants in Them! actually look pretty good. I've seen billions of movie creatures in my life and these ants are just as convincing as the monkeys in Rise of the Planets of the Apes. I don't mean to say that the fifty plus year old puppet ants look better than the CGI rendered apes, just that the emotion and feeling of watching them are roughly the same in the context of the film. When the people are exploring the tunnels and are surrounded by the menacing looking ants, it never occurred to me that "Hey, that's obviously a puppet," or "It would look so much better if it was CGI." Instead, I was wondering how the hell the people were going to get out alive. In that regard, the special effects did everything you could possibly ask out of them.
Grade: B
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