Just give her a pipe and she’ll fit right in.
Them! (1954) is a highly competent story-telling effort grafted onto a nuclear horror meme. It all starts with the discovery of a little girl wandering the New Mexican desert by the police. Traced to a nearby vacation trailer owned by an FBI agent, the location of her family remains a mystery, as the trailer has been wrecked.
Sending the kid to a hospital via ambulance, the cops find a local store similarly vandalized, and the proprietor dead. One of the cops heads for the station, leaving the other to face the New Mexican night and its shadows.
It doesn’t go well.
Soon, a father & daughter team of entomologists from the Federal Government show up in response for calls for assistance. With their help, the local New Mexicans finally find a huge mound, and in it is … well … monsters.
Nuclear monsters.
They’re eradicated, but where there’s one mutation, there can be more, and a nationwide search yields another infestation under Los Angeles, missing children, and the ongoing challenge of bad special effects.
But that last is the worst of the movie, and badly done monsters is something of a tradition in the industry of the time. The rest of Them! is absolutely nothing to sneeze at: tight, logical, and plausible plot, a minimum of gender discrimination, and excellent acting and sets. It was really a pleasure to watch.
If you like monster movies from the era prior to the advent of computer graphics, Them!, despite its fairly odd title – yes, I know the little girl uses it – is one of the best of that category.
