THEM!

We open in the New Mexico desert sometime in the early 1950s. Two coppers, Ben Peterson and Ed Blackburn, find a young girl wandering near the road, shell shocked and unable to speak. Further up the way, they find her family's trailer torn apart. There are no signs of survivors, only a strange indentation left in the sand by some unknown animal. As the men survey the wreckage, they hear a strange sound, like a whistling. Writing it off as just the wind, the men call for backup.

After forensics arrives, Peterson and Blackburn head a mile up the road to a local home supply store, hoping the owner can give them some kind of lead. They find the place in shambles, the owner lying dead in the cellar. Blackburn stays behind to wait for forensics while Peterson heads off back to the station. That's when the strange whistling sound comes back and Blackburn is killed by something fairly large (and fairly hungry) off screen.

The case goes nowhere, even after Robert Graham, an FBI agent, joins the investigation. Their big break comes with the arrival of Doctor Harold Medford and his daughter (also a doctor) Patricia. Employees of the Department of Agriculture, they had been assigned to examine the plaster cast of that strange indentation found in the sand near the trailer. The Medfords have a hypothesis. The presence of sugar at the crime scenes... The abundance of formic acid in the body of the store owner... The footprint that looks distinctly like that of an ant... There's also the business of the atomic tests that took place in White Sands back in 1945, a stretch of desert not too far from the sleepy town our characters call home.

A close encounter in the desert proves the hypothesis to be true. The atomic age has given birth to a terrifying mutation. Gigantic ants, upwards of 12 feet in length, turned carnivorous from lack of food, are spawning somewhere in the sands. With a small group of military personnel, our band of heroes are able to destroy the New Mexico colony, but not before two queens hatch and fly off to parts unknown. The hunt is now on and the timer is ticking down. Failure to find and contain the ants will lead to mass devastation, if not total human extinction.

THEM! was released in 1954, the same year that saw the Japanese release of the original GODZILLA. While there are a few coincidental similarities between the two (for example, both feature scenes of ships being destroyed by giant monsters and both films stage the reveal of their beasties in practically the same way, with their large heads poking out above rock formations), the real similarity between the two is in their tone. The atomic age sci-fi b-flicks of the 1950s would turn campy a few years later, but THEM! shows no signs of humor, intentional or otherwise, in its presentation. The film plays deadly straight with its subject matter, sometimes even approaching full blown horror movie theatrics.

The first half of the film is the strongest. We begin with a gruesome murder mystery, move quickly into the realm of science fiction, and then swiftly descend from there into claustrophobic horror. The ants, while not particularly convincing, prove to be quite the onscreen spectacle and the descent into the New Mexico formicary is a tense, supremely well executed bit of filmmaking. Unfortunately, Medford's discovery that the nest contained two missing queens signals the transition away from horror-tinged science fiction. From that point on, THEM! becomes more of an action film, complete with the all-too-familiar military worship often found in 1950s b-movies of this sort.

To be fair, although THEM! does become something much more routine in its final half, it's still a great film. The underlying pretense that what we're watching is a serious disaster prevention movie rather than a schlocky cheese fest with big bugs never goes away, and the final ten or so minutes brings the claustrophobic chills back with aplomb. The final attack on the ants takes place in the sewer system of Los Angeles. Tunnels collapse, hordes of giant ants appear from out of the darkness, a lead character we presumed safe bites the dust, and the whole thing wraps itself up in fire and explosions. It's a great, thrilling climax after a shaky second act.

Another departure from the 1950s b-movie norm comes in the final moments of THEM!. Normally when we walk away from films like this, we do so with the comfort that nothing like this will happen again. Nuclear regulatory agencies will tighten their grasp and the military will stand ready just in case the grasp ever slips. But THEM! doesn't have quite the same optimistic outlook. A character mentions the obvious. If the ants were the result of just a single test… what will come of all the other detonations?

Thankfully, the answer to that question was a whole spate of giant monster movies, including IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA, TARANTULA and 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH. THEM! proved to be as influential in the States as GODZILLA was in Japan, although the giant monster craze was much shorter lived here. The film would go on to inspire video games like the Cinemaware classic It Came from the Desert and the Fallout series, whole scores of pulp writers like Guy N. Smith, and even later science fiction films like ALIENS and TREMORS. It's easy to see why THEM! was such a hit back in 1954 and why the film is still appreciated by sci-fi and horror fans today. It really is a genuinely good film, buoyed by terrific performances and snappy direction, held together with clear sighted seriousness. Is it on the same level of genius as THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD? Maybe not, but it most definitely deserves to be remembered as one of the finest atomic age terrors ever to grace the silver screen.

KONG: SKULL ISLAND

It's tempting to think that KONG: SKULL ISLAND was written as a quasi-apology to the dissatisfied people who purchased tickets for Gareth Edwards' 2014 GODZILLA thinking it would be some kind of epic monster-filled fight fest. It's also tempting to think that KONG: SKULL ISLAND was written in an attempt to erase Peter Jackson's wistful, misguidedly romantic remake from memory. The Kong in Jackson's film was written as a lovelorn, tragic figure, an oversized gorilla with a heart of gold. The Kong director Jordan Vogt-Roberts offers up here is the Cooper-Schoedsack monster on steroids and thankfully the film isn't stingy with his appearances, more than making up for the lack of monster action in Edwards' otherwise superb reboot.

It's also a Vietnam allegory, a fact it simply will not allow you to forget as it pummels you with anti-war rock and roll, and images lifted straight from other anti-Vietnam films like APOCALYPSE NOW. Given the year the film takes place in, the allegory fits, but I must admit it seems odd to be watching a KING KONG reboot made in 2017 that relies heavily on anti-Vietnam sentiment for its subtext. I have to wonder if that was the only thing they could think to do with the film in the writer's room.

And to be honest, the moment to moment writing of the film is its weakest attribute. It's a simple story. Mere days after the US announces that it will be abandoning Vietnam, a war-loving commander is hired to escort some wet behind the ears scientists to an uncharted island. Once they arrive by helicopter, seismic bombs are dropped to help map the guts of the place, an unfortunate choice of scientific instrumentation that draws the ire of Kong, a massive ape-like monster. In short order, helicopters are destroyed and our band of adventurers are split. One group, headed by Sam Jackson's cranky “kill 'em all” military alpha male, decides to put killing Kong at the top of their bucket list. The other, which includes Tom Hiddleston's suave British tracker and Brie Larson's tough anti-war photographer, just wants off the damn rock. Our second group meets the traditional band of Skull Island natives, here playing host to John C. Reilly's Hank, a World War II pilot that crashed on the island well over 25 years ago.

And that's your dichotomy, folks. One group is out for blood and the other just wants to leave nature as it is and head home. The interplay between the two groups never reaches its full potential and things are not so much worked out between the two, either by fisticuffs or heated debate, as continually interrupted by all kinds of nasty beasties who eye up our cast like they were items on a well stocked buffet.

And I said “cast” rather than “characters” because all the personalities on display here are thin, if not wholly transparent. The actors chosen to fill the roles were clearly cast because of the attitudes and personalities we often associate with them. You don't really need to spend time building the character of the stern and blood frenzied Preston Packard when you can just hire Sam Jackson to do that heavy lifting for you. Need a relatable, kindly father figure for your film? Just hire John Goodman. Need a sexy Brit who can charm the audience? Hire Tom Hiddleston. Need a pretty Chinese actress to satisfy your Chinese investors? I think you get the idea.

In that respect, KONG: SKULL ISLAND is not going to pacify the people who felt that GODZILLA was full of understated, if not downright boring, characters. That isn't to say that the people we spend time with on Skull Island are uninteresting or even dull. They're just not well rounded. No one has an arc. Everyone leaves (well, not everyone; people die by the truckload here) just as they came. They're not audience surrogates. They're moving targets for larger than life monsters with insatiable appetites.

And that is why I will say that KONG: SKULL ISLAND is a tale of two films. Because once the monster stuff started happening, every single complaint I had went straight out the window and the film became astoundingly great fun.

There's an undeniable appeal to watching one large thing beat the snot out of another large thing, but KONG: SKULL ISLAND isn't all ape-on-lizard action. What would a trip to Skull Island be without a giant spider, adorably large buffalo, some prehistoric pteranodon-like flying creatures and the occasional enormous octopus? The “new” threat introduced in the film (and I say “new” because they're more or less just a re-imagined version of the two legged lizard thing that threatened Bruce Cabot after Kong tossed his friends into a ravine) are the skull crawlers, all tooth, claw and tongue. They're great monsters, unique in design, but familiar enough to bring back those old childhood memories of Kong tussling with a tyrannosaurus. The monster action is surprisingly nasty at times too, with people having their limbs torn off, being crushed against rocks and, in my favorite scene of the entire film, being impaled from mouth to ass, a la CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST.

Behold! The first skull crawler.

The decision to untether Kong from his previous big screen adventures allows the filmmakers to reinvent the character as a kind of ferocious guardian angel. One moment, he's crushing gun toting soldiers to death, the next he's carefully lifting a crashed helicopter off a poor, struggling giant buffalo. Naturally, we have the requisite scene of Kong looking in awe at the gorgeous white woman standing in front of him and there is a nice call back to the 1933 original when Kong accidentally gets himself wrapped up in chains, but for the most part, Kong feels less like a rehashed character and more like a brand new imagining. We feel something for Kong because, like all good heroes, he's an orphan, the last of his kind. But we never once forget that Kong is, above all else, a wild animal, both frightening and majestic in equal proportion.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure that this Kong will be as fondly remembered as his previous incarnations, if only because this Kong doesn't get shot off a skyscraper. KONG: SKULL ISLAND is meant to be the second entry in a much larger cinematic universe, one that will soon include Rodan, Mothra and King Ghidorah. As such, the film doesn't feel like its complete. It feels like its missing something, some kind of resolution that would make the film resonate long after you've left the theater. Helicopters crash, some people die, some people leave. That's pretty much it. KONG: SKULL ISLAND is a damn great roller coaster ride that you get on, have a few screams and a nice, big adrenaline rush, and then get off and move on with your day. It needed something more and for the life of me, I can't really pinpoint what that something more is. 

I can only say this: for the better part of two hours, I was hugely entertained. I ate my fill and then some. But an hour later, I was hungry all over again.