Seeing how much I’m a big fan of those “Big Bug” flicks from the 50s, I’m surprised I haven’t reviewed the one that started it all until now. Them! was such a success for Warner Brothers it single handedly created a subgenre, with Universal stepping in to add a couple more to it with Tarantula (1955) (reviewed here) and The Deadly Mantis (1957) (reviewed here), while Warner themselves would try to duplicate’s Them!’s success with The Black Scorpion (reviewed here) later in the decade. Giant spiders have always had more success getting movies made about them, so it’s no surprise there were two of them in the 50s, the second being American International Pictures’ Earth Vs. The Spider (1958, aka The Spider) (reviewed here). Other “bugs” getting the rampaging movie treatment were scorpions (The Black Scorpion, 1957); grasshoppers (Beginning Of The End, 1957); wasps (Monster From Green Hell, 1958) (reviewed here); and a menagerie of them in Britain’s The Strange World Of Planet X (1958 aka Cosmic Monsters). The top tier ones, in my opinion, are Them!, Tarantula, The Deadly Mantis and The Black Scorpion, with a big honorable mention going to Earth Vs. The Spider. Personally, I’ve always liked that giant spider movie a little bit more than the more polished Tarantula, due to the inherent creepiness and horror aspects Spider has over Tarantula.

I’m not old enough to have seen any of these movies when they first came out, I’m Gen-X , which means I caught them all on TV in the seventies when I was a little kid, and I can’t totally remember if I knew beforehand Them! was about giant ants, for the movie is constructed in the first half as a mystery, and the title doesn’t give anything away either, but the theatrical posters and trailer were never shy about hiding that fact. I read a lot of monster movie books back then, so I may have known it was a giant ant movie, but I can’t guarantee that. I saw the movie for the first time on a weekend, and I do recall commercials for it beforehand, but again I don’t remember if those TV spots revealed it was a giant ant flick or not.

This movie is paced and plotted perfectly, starting out with a mystery set up as a New Mexico police plane scours the desert for a little girl (Sandy Descher). Helping in the search on the ground are two troopers, Sgt. Ben Peterson (James Whitmore) and Trooper Ed Blackburn (Chris Drake). The plane finally spots the girl and the two troopers move in to rescue her. She’s traumatized and unable to speak. The plane then spots a car and trailer down the road, and thinking she may belong there Peterson and Blackburn go to check it out and find the side of the trailer has been pulled out; bloody and torn clothing, and a strange footprint no one’s ever seen the likes of before. Ben calls in a forensic team and an ambulance. Our second mysterious introduction to the giant ants comes in the form of this sudden high pitched sound echoing throughout the desert. Ben and the ambulance driver chalk it up to the wind out in these parts doing odd things.

The next set piece we get that just compounds whatever the hell is slowly being uncovered here is a quick trip down to a general store run by a Gramps Johnson (Mathew McCue) where Peterson and Blackburn find a similar aftermath. The store is in ruins and part of it has been pulled out. Not caved in, but pulled out. Before Johnson’s body is discovered in a cellar, they find his rifle, bent. So, what the hell can pull out the side of a trailer and store, bend a rifle, make a family disappear, and leave a child traumatized and a shop owner dead? Ben is befuddled, and decides to head back to crime scene #1 to notify the forensic team they’re going to have a much longer day out in the desert than they thought. Blackburn tells his older partner he’ll catch a ride back with them when they show up. That decision ends up being the death of Blackburn. This whole scene is happening in sandstorm, with dark skies, setting the mood as suddenly those weird sounds heard earlier start echoing, but they’re really close this time. Blackburn heads outside to investigate, he encounters something he can’t handle, screams and gunshots are heard and that’s the end of Trooper Blackburn’s time in this movie. His body is never found.

Later on we’ll learn the extent of damage Gramps suffered: broken back and neck, crushed chest, and how the hell did a shit load of formic acid get injected into him? These ants use it as a poison delivered through their ass positioned stingers.

I’ve always loved that set up, and it continues a little while longer too. The key seems to be this mysterious footprint the forensic team made a cast of, this print was also found at Gramps’ store. Oh, right, I forgot to mention that little’s girl’s father is discovered to be an FBI agent, and this agent was on vacation with this family, so now the Feds have a stake in this and that brings in out next lead character, FBI Agent Robert Graham (James Arness). So, we have two possible heroes, but in movies back then two is sometimes too many, which means one of these guys is going die in the course of this flick. That blows because I liked both of them.

The next two leads are scientists, Dr. Harold Medford (Edmund Gwenn) and his daughter Pat (Joan Weldon). That print was sent off for identification and suddenly Ben and Bob are told to expect the arrival of both of them ASAP. The mystery deepens because after we’re introduced to the both of them, we’ll eventually see they know what’s going on but won’t share their theory until they know for sure. Now, had Peterson or Graham, or anyone else for that matter, knew what a myrmecologist was, they’d have some insane idea what this was all leading to. All four end up out in the desert again, since elder Medford wanted to see where the prints were discovered and Bob confronts Pat about being so secretive, that’s when their specialty is mentioned and Bob has no idea what a myrmecologist is. It’s about 30-minutes in when we finally understand what’s been making people disappear and destroying property, as a worker ant bumps into Pat, screeching in that high pitched sound we heard earlier. Stop motion animation wasn’t new to Hollywood in 1954, but they chose to go with full-sized giant ant animatronic puppets, which look spectacular! Warner, however, would decide to use a combination of stop motion and full-sized puppetry when they made The Black Scorpion, and attempt to do a similar mystery set up, and use the same ant sound effects. That’s a good movie, I’m a fan of it obviously, but it’s no Them!

The giant ants don’t show up a lot, there’s only two major action scenes with them (one in the second act, one at the end of the third), with three minor ones around it, but the ant scenes are spaced perfectly apart, with an interesting plot of first finding them out in the desert (the scientists are hoping to keep this menace confined locally), infiltrating their nest and flame throwing their asses into oblivion, then after learning they were too late in wiping out the nest, for several queens left it before hand, then having to track them down to they’re new nest now, this time with a happier ending, but with a somber note uttered by Medford stating since the first atomic bomb detonated a decade earlier resulted in these oversized mutations what about all the other bombs detonated after that?

This is the movie where I learned about the existence of flame throwers, for they’re used for the first time in the extermination of the ants out in the desert. It’s hard to say which is the most awe inspiring and harrowing ant battle, this one or the last one. Once the nest is found the mound is saturated with bazooka delivered explosive phosphorescence meant to make it so hot it’ll keep them in it. Cyanide is then dropped in and all the ants are killed. But how does one know they are? That’s where you have to assemble a team crazy enough to go in and check. Yeah, good luck with that. Bob, Ben and Pat are the crazies. Ben’s the one with the flame thrower and we get a few scenes of him burning up an egg chamber and a couple of soldiers who managed to avoid the lethal gas.

The equally impressive final onslaught of the new nest is cool too. There’s a period of five to six months that pass as everyone runs down leads of strange things people may have seen that could be ant related until they learn one of the new nests is in the storm drains underneath Los Angeles. Now, everything would have gone off without a hitch, and none of the cast would have had to die had those two missing kids didn’t need to be found. You see they run into a lead of a man crashing his car, poor dude had his arm ripped off and his face messed up when he encountered the ants one morning when he took his kids down to one of the river systems to fly an airplane. It’s theorized by Ben since the kids weren’t found they must have ran into the storm drain to hide, so the plan of just chucking in a shit ton of cyanide ain’t going to fly, because those two kids might still be alive. So the army, Ben and Bob take in a patrol of jeeps to search and Ben’s the one who finds them.

There’s no gore in this flick at all, so when Ben gets killed it ain’t gory, though when I did watch this I knew in reality when poor Ben got picked up by those pincers he would have been easily snipped in half. Instead he gets a G-rated death of being roughly manhandled by the mandibles as he screams in pain; to late Bob rushes in and guns the fucker down. Though he did save the kids before the ant got him, he just wasn’t fast enough to climb back up into the drain pipe he put the kids in, and he had to take off the flame thrower to do that, and that damn ant was too stealthy for its own good.

This last half now as Bob and the army gunning down marauding ants right and left as they make their way into the egg chamber, one of the more impressive scenes is when the ceiling collapses separating Bob from his military back up and now he’s in an area by himself, with a bunch of ants. On the plus side he has a machine gun and, man, he comes oh-so-close to buying the farm as he bumps into a couple of them and he crazily starts shooting, stumbling around, shooting again, repeat until the army breaks through and saves him. Some impressive scenes there my friends. This was one of many Sci-Fi movies that spurred me and my brother to go get our toy guns and pretend giant ants were coming after us, and I had a toy gun that was a replica of the one Bob uses in the final act.

Giant ant movie aren’t all that common, counting this one we have four in existence. The next is Empire Of The Ants (1977) (reviewed here), and that one introduced a base level of gore, after that there’s It Came From The Desert (2017) and Dead Ant (2017). Both of those are spoofs to a degree. I’ve seen It Came From The Desert (reviewed here) but have not seen Dead Ant. That one is more of a comedy than It Came From The Desert. Personally, I’d love to see Warner do a big budget remake of Them!

Warner Brothers still has the rights to Them! (1954) and they’ve re-released the old snapper case DVD a couple of years ago as a DVD-R from their MOD Program Warner Archive Collection. Their 2015 blu-ray is still in print as well and you can get both here and here on Amazon!

VIDEO/AUDIO/SUBTITLES: 1080p 1.78:1 high definition widescreen—1.0 English DTS-HD Master Audio (mono), 1.0 Spanish Dolby Digital (mono), 1.0 Spanish Dolby Digital (mono)—English SDH, French, Japanese, Spanish subs

This 2015 transfer doesn’t look bad, but I feel Warner needs to do another remaster of it. The 2003 DVD was full frame, so the main selling point for this blu was WB finally decided to widescreen it.

EXTRAS INCLUDED . . .

  • Ants (3:06)
  • Theatrical Trailer (3:19)