Old Movie Watching with Rob's video: Them 1954 - Movie Review

Them! was an entertaining mutant monster film from 1954. It's black and white, although it was cool how they briefly incorporate some color into the main title. So the film opens up with some police officers, Christian Drake and James Whitmore, are driving through the New Mexico desert when they find a lone child just wandering alone with her doll. She's in this catatonic, shocked state, so they bring her into the car, and then go and investigate a local house that's been thoroughly destroyed. By who... or what? The damage includes weird clues like odd scale remnants and evidence that sugar was eaten. Oh, I wonder what we could be dealing with? Now I'll say this, for the first 30 minutes or so of the film, we don't really see anything of the mysterious monsters, and I really loved that suspense, as we see the officers creeping around an abandoned store, finding mysterious footprints, all the while the desert winds howl in the background. They find a badly damaged body that was killed in a really nasty way (but this is the 1950's so it's not very graphic. The coroners description later, though, tells that he could have been killed in a number of ways, including tons of formic acid in the body. Hmmm... An investigation starts to grow, and FBI agent Robert Graham arrives (played by the massive James Arness) and, wait a minute, I thought FBI agents always arrived in pairs? Anyhow, he soon meets up with the cheerful old scientist Dr. Medford, played by Edmund Gwenn, of Miracle on 34th Street (Kris Kringle!). He sortof has a Dr. Hammond vibe to him here as this soft-spoken English guy. His daughter is with him, Patricia (played by the loverly Joan Weldon). She's a clever scientist as well and, as the film goes on, she contributes her knowledge to figuring out how to deal with this creepy situation. So Dr. Hammond, I mean, Medford, figures out that back in the 1940's there had been atomic testing in that area, so of course, we can start to figure out that this is likely some sort of mutant creature. So Dr. Medford meets with the little girl from earlier, and she's still out of it, but they give her a whiff of the formic acid and she memorable screams, "Them! Them!" The gang depart the hospital head to the trailer site. While looking around we finally get our first look at the monsters and, ok, they are a little cheesy, but all things considered not too bad for the 1950's. They take this one down by shooting it. General O'Brien (played by Onslow Stevens) and the crew head into helicopters to fly over the desert to look for nests. On the ground they make the descent, and the film takes on an "Aliens" vibe to it, as the crew destroy some ants with flamethrowers. There's even a queen's chamber with eggs in it that get roasted, much like Aliens. I wonder if James Cameron was a fan of this film? Soon there's a military council in Washington D.C. with lots of smoking guys. Dr. Medford shows a film about ants, part of which includes an example of an ant trapped in amber. I wonder if Spielberg was a fan of this film? So we cut to a government agency that is studying mysterious reports (sort of a prototype X-files, I wonder if Chris Carter was a.... oh, I'll stop.) And what was cool is that there is a very brief uncredited cameo by Leonard Nimoy, as a character who is ironically receiving a report of someone who has seen a UFO. I love it. THIRD time uploading this. YT really didn't like the very brief, silent video clips I used, so trimmed them out and kept the original audio. Sigh, I need to go back further into the past I suppose...