Wonkette Movie Night: Them!
'And there shall be destruction and darkness come upon creation, and the beasts shall reign over the earth.'
Which is scarier, giant ants or big aunts?
Big Aunt Kathy can be totally awesome with sweet treats, $5 in your birthday card and even the pinching of the cheeks has love attached to it (although you are 62 years old). But then again Big Aunt Marge can be hell and wants to know why you never got married and what’s up with the roommate in a one BR apartment; also why can’t you dress more feminine, you aren’t one of THEM are you?
Giant ants on the other hand demand sweet treats, will try to crush you in their mandibles and emit a terrifying screeching sound. OK so Big Aunt Marge might be tied for the scariest, she is a bit similar.
The giants ants in Them! have gotten so huge because of radiation from the first atomic bomb test at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in New Mexico. Sci-fi films of the 1950s were filled with mutated monsters caused by radiation. The nuclear devastation caused by the dropping of atom bombs on Japan created a slew of mega monsters known as Kaiju starting with the king of them all, Godzilla. (Thirty of them free to watch on the Internet Archive here.) Which premiered in 1954 as Gojira, the same year as Them!
The cleverness of Them! is taking a tiny creature that we may crush beneath our feet and making them the ones who do the crushing. I watched this flick with my dad as a kid, he was a huge fan of sci-fi movies. He liked to explain to me some of the deeper meanings attached to these films. A fear of communism informed the themes of much of 1950s sci-fi cinema, like 1956’s Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. (I originally typed “cummunism” and that kind of typo needs to be memorialized.)
Many of these films also leaned into the fear of what kinds of havoc science and exploration could possibly cause, while at the same time presenting the scientists as the ones saving the day. In Them! the scientists saving the day actually include a woman. A pair of myrmecologists (they study ants), a dad and daughter team of doctors, are brought in to help find a way to stop the ants after a person is found with mutilizations in the basement of a destroyed building.
I am thinking that this is a job way past the Orkin Man’s abilities to handle.
But the ants are already spreading and it may be too late to stop the destruction as the military and scientists make a final last stand in Los Angeles.
But a new breed has risen and they scare the establishment the most…
Giant Ant-Tifa!
Them! stars James Arness, James Whitmore, Joan Weldon, Edmund Gwenn, Sandy Descher, Fess Parker, Chris Drake, and Leonard Nimoy. Directed by Gordon Douglas.
Them! is available for free with ads on Plex, free on the Internet Archive and $3.99 in the usual places.
To make requests and see the movie lists and schedules go to WonkMovie.
The animated short is The Grasshopper And The Ants, the classic 1934 Silly Symphony from Disney.
Our next Movie Night selection is MST3K: The Crawling Eye, it is available for free on YouTube.
𝐁𝐎𝐍𝐔𝐒 𝐓𝐑𝐈𝐕𝐈𝐀:
I use IMDb for the trivia. The trivia is submitted by the public. Under each bit of info it can be voted as 👍 Helpful or 👎 Not helpful. If it doesn't have a high "Helpful" rating I don't use it. The list starts with the highest rated bits, by the time you hit the bottom there's some unusual stuff.
I came across this as last on the list which was rated 2 Helpful to 11 Not helpful. SO WOKE!:
"At about 29 minutes the elder Dr. Medford says to shoot the antennae as "he's helpless without them". How does he know the gender of the ant is male? In so many creature movies the creatures are referred to as he/him/his when they could just as likely be she/her/hers. As with most animal species it's likely only 50% are male. Thus it would be more logical to refer to each creature as it/it/its. If more than one, "them" is gender neutral. Corrective Note: 1 in 3 ants in a colony are male and only produced for breeding. The workers and soldiers are females."
Say: "Over"
Say it again.
Then say "Over and out."