My Favourite Movies: Them!

Deep in the New Mexico desert a State Patrol plane is circling checking out a report of a lost little girl wandering in the scrub. When the police find her she is practically catatonic with shock. Tracing her back to the trailer she wandered away from the police find a scene of total devastation. So begins an investigation that gets stranger by the hour. That evening a local store owner is found dead, crushed and with enough formic acid inside him to kill 20 men. At a loss the local police send for the FBI who are equally baffled. When Washington gets involved they send two of their scientists to investigate. It’s not long before they produce an amazing theory. Just nine years before the US had exploded the first atomic bomb not far from the site of the grisly events under investigation. In that time local ants had, the believed, mutated into giant monsters. But it’s only when they’re attacked in the desert by a wandering scout that theory becomes terrifying reality. When the nest is located and destroyed with cyanide gas they discover to their horror that two queens had already escaped to make new nests somewhere in the vast empty spaces of the USA. Left undiscovered they could produce millions of the giant killers and threaten the existence of mankind itself.

I’m not sure how old I was when I first saw this 1954 classic. I do know that I found parts of it deeply disturbing. The noise the giant ants make can still give me Goosebumps and several scenes can still creep me out. Early on one of the police officers investigates a noise in the night and goes to investigate. Cunningly we don’t see anything – he’s off camera at the time – we just hear ant-noise, gun fire and then screaming. It must have terrified audiences 50 years ago. But my all time favourite scene has to be the hatching of the nest on board a steam freighter at sea. Intercut with the teletype message from a US Navy destroyer heading for the location we see the crew desperately fighting the newly hatched monsters with whatever weapons come to hand whilst the radio operator, already severely wounded, calls for help by Morse code. It’s a gripping image.

OK, the acting was a bit wooden at times and the dialogue sucked in places but, despite inadequate SFX this movie works. It does work better before the ants are actually seen but that’s common to all Horror/SF films up to and including Alien. What makes this film one of my all time favourites is the suspense, the drama, the plotting and the pace of this movie. It also has a very good atmospheric score. For all its dated qualities this is still a great SF B-movie. If you love SF you really need to have seen it at least once.