Them! (1954)
Directed by Gordon Douglas
The king of the giant bug movie boom of the 1950s (appearing in video games, cameoing in Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World, referenced in Honey, I Shrunk the Kids), Them! imagines a colony of noisy, nuclear-charged ants menacing the entire Southwest. From the exclaimed title to the old-Hollywood craft of the still-spirited effects, it’s a feat of hokum balanced with thrills. Nothing exemplifies this better, perhaps, than the ants’ wail, a jangling earworm that instantly recalls the old days of sci-fi, where, whether by ant or the A-Bomb, the fear hung that we could undone by our trespasses on knowledge and nature. Jeremy Polacek (July 11, 12, noon at the Nitehawk)