As has been my habit of late, I’m catching-up on old movies I remember from my youth seen on the screen at the time of release or remembered from ’60s-’80s replays on late-night television. Watching them on a widescreen TV in DVD format with surround sound and, of course, with the benefit of hindsight, it becomes a whole new experience.
THEM! is a wonderful Cold-War era movie which manages, without trying, to prove that modern SF blockbusters owe much to their (especially) ’50s progenitors. Given the limited budget of B-Grade movies they manage to thrill across the generations – even while remakes and plagiaristic sequences abound and dazzle contemporary audiences.
The ‘storm-drain’ sequence in T2 is a prime example, as is the ‘egg burning’ scenario in ALIEN, complete with flamethrowers. You saw them first in THEM!, folks. The ‘isolated and mysteriously-wrecked gas station/general store’ is another stolen moment from THEM! and has appeared in many movies – even the X-FILES. Wearing the flame-retardant suits and the breathing-apparatuses to attack ‘the nest’ pops up in EVOLUTION. And so it goes.
There are some excellent actors in this film – most of whom are B-Grade stalwarts (James Whitmore and James Arness for example) – and they play it straight. No ‘camping-it-up’ for these heroes! I even spotted a young Leonard Nimoy as an Airforce sergeant. Fess Parker as the confused witness of the ‘ant-shaped UFOs’ offers both light-hearted humour and the prototype for the innocent caught in a cover-up: he’s left in the mental hospital as a deranged psychotic as per the suggestion put to his doctor. How many times have we seen this since? Even the little girl, a traumatised survivor of the attack on her parents’ trailer-home, has resonances in the character of a similar survivor in ALIENS.
OK, the irradiated monsters/ants are pretty hokey, but see my remark re small budgets. CGI didn’t exist then.
I’d place this production alongside such classics as INVADERS FROM MARS and the British QUATERMASS (trilogy?) which also terrorised my generation. We were children in a time when the world seemed doomed to nuclear destruction and our homes ripe for invasion by THEM!, regardless of who (yes, I know, the Communists) or what (monsters created by our cavalier use of technology) would be invading. And, strangely, nothing has changed, except that postmodern children seem to have lost their innocence in a demonstrably violent and insane milieu. As I stated before, these movies, in hindsight have lost none of their power. The themes remain the same.
