Schlocktober: Them! and Empire of the Ants · 5:12pm Oct 3rd, 2014
The giant mutated insect running amok is one of those stables of schlocky B-grade science fiction movies. Spiders remain one of the more poplar choices here, presumably because they are the best at scaring the absolute bejeezus out of people. But for my money, the insect de jure for a movies like this is the ant, because of one movie.
1954's Them! is probably the least schlocky movie that I'll cover in this little series, for a variety of reasons. Warner Brothers put some support behind this movie, and it showed in the fact that it was nominated for a special effects Oscar and it won a Golden Reel Award for best sound editing. It was one of the first movies to play with the fallout of nuclear weapons and one of the first "big bug" films, that would spawn dozens of imitators throughout the years. It, as a film, is one of the foundation stones of science fiction.
The movie begins with a pair of New Mexico state troopers, Ben Peterson (James Whitmore) and Ed Blackburn (Chris Drake), finding a little girl wandering along the side of the road in a state of complete shock. Back tracking her path, they find a trailer home that's been torn to pieces, the only real clue as to what's happened is a single odd animal track and an odd call on the wind. On their way to take the girl in, they come across a local general store that has been similarly trashed. Ed offers to stay behind to secure the site while his partner goes on. However, its not long before Blackburn hears the strange warbling chitter from before. Leaving the building, the last thing we hear is his screaming and discharging his weapon off camera while the cry grows louder and more intense.
That, most importantly, is the reason why Them! holds up the way it does. It holds off the reveal of the titular giant ants at first, using wrecked sets, dark lighting, and blowing sand on the winds to set a mood, using the fear of the unknown to wind up its viewers. This is also why the movie scared the hell out of me back when I first saw it when I was four.
Admittedly, once the reveal of the giant ants happens, the movie becomes more of a straight creature feature with some of the usual hallmarks of the genre. White guys talking to each other, calling in the army and so on and so forth. The final showdown takes place in the drainage tunnels beneath LA, where it all ends in fire. Good flick though!
Time would march along in the world of science fiction, and nuclear radiation would become supplanted by new sources of mutation, including such things as toxic radiation and genetic manipulation. Which brings us to the next giant ant movie that I wanted to touch upon, Empire of the Ants.
Empire of the Ants is loosely (and I mean very loosely) based on a short story by H.G Wells. But where the Wells tale has the ants as normal sized, but just frighteningly intelligent (which in some ways feels even worse), the Bert I. Gordon movie uses toxic waste to make the ants really big, as well as intelligent. Or maybe they were always intelligent. The movie isn't all that clear.
Bert I. Gordon is probably familiar to anyone who's watched MST3K, as that show broadcast one of the director's earlier movies The Beginning of the End, which featured giant grasshoppers (really) attacking Chicago. Bert's chosen weapon for realizing his giant creatures is the tool of rear-projection, using close up footage of the actual animals involved.
This...honestly is what undermines Empire of the Ants more than anything else in the end. The actors, already stuck playing some of the big 70's movie character cliches, have to react to things that usually aren't in the same shot as them, there's no real way to control the ants like you could with a CGI construct. There are multiple times where the ants would start to walk on the sky because the actual ants were climbing on the backdrop they were filmed against.
The most interesting thing about this movie in my mind, is that the giant ants have actually taken over a town, with the queen using her pheromones to brainwash the humans into serving their whims, which mostly seems to be growing and refining sugar for them. Which makes them very lazy ants, really. Just let the humans do all the work, and then we'll sit around and eat all the sugar! At least until this plucky band of vacationers set the queen on fire and ruin everything, the jerks.
In the end though, Empire just can't hold up to Them! and seems to be more indicative of where creature features would end up in the end, landing more on your SyFy Channel as other brands of Science Fiction rose to take new dominance over the genre. Still, I stand by my thoughts that ants totally make better giant monster fodder than spiders.
Next week on Schlocktober, we bounce over to Japan to talk about two tokusatsu series that were edited down into a pair of stand alone VHS movies for a US release. Till next time!
I remember Them! fondly as my first giant bug movie, and my first introduction to the flame thrower.
As an aside, if we go by the banner from the Skitchverse group, in your Equestria, Them! would be a documentary.