(1954)
This year's Halloween Movie Madness is full of a bunch of movies I have never seen before, and three of those movies are about ants. The first of the three, THEM, came out just over 20 years before I was born..
THEM is a movie that stars Marshall Matt Dillon (James Arness), Mark Twain (James Whitmore), and Santa Claus (Edmund Gwenn) facing off against giant, mutated, radioactive ants in New Mexico and Los Angeles.
The movie starts out with the police finding a little girl wandering through the desert. This girl happens to have one of the best thousand yard stares I have ever seen in a movie.
The police then find a travel trailer that they think might belong to the girl's parents. The only problem is that the side of the trailer has been torn open, and no one is around. After sending the girl off to the hospital to be checked out, the two police officers head off to a nearby general store to see if the proprietor noticed anything. When they arrive, they find the owner dead, and a big hole in the side of his store.
To avoid any spoilers, I'll stop there. I will say that this movie doesn't go the way I expected it to. There wasn't a ton of action in it, but it never really felt too slow to me. I actually somewhat enjoyed the movie. It didn't seem super cheesy, and that is impressive to me because giant ants. I also need to say that the poster is about five thousand times more rad than anything you see in the film.
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If you haven't seen THEM before, I You aren't really missing much. I don't feel like I completely wasted my time watching it, but it probably isn't one I'd revisit any time soon.