BEFORE: James Arness carries over from "The Thing From Another World", where he played the title villain, and today he plays a human, the male lead in this invasion story. But the invasion this time is home-grown, it's giant ants attacking humans...
THE PLOT: The earliest atomic tests in New Mexico cause common ants to mutate into giant man-eating monsters that threaten civilization.
AFTER: I guess I should have realized by setting up a week of 1950's films that I'd have to suffer through some very fakey special effects. These are obviously some kind of puppet ants, large-scale models that were made to rock back and forth to simulate life-like movement. As opposed to using close-up footage of real ants and superimposing it against the live-action footage of people, which would have been another way to go. Something tells me that neither method would have looked realistic, but maybe the use of real ant footage might have worked a little better, but I guess we'll never know.
I thought that most 1950's Hollywood horror films were symbolically about the spread of Communism, but I guess not, I'm hard pressed to find a connection to politics here. Maybe they're Red ants, but that's hard to tell in a black-and-white movie. They're green on the poster, which is weird because I've never seen green ants in nature. And these are supposed to be real ants that were enlarged somehow with radiation, even though we know now that excessive radiation doesn't make things bigger, it just kills them. But I guess in the 1950's filmmakers didn't worry too much about science, because that would just get in the way of the premise that they wanted.
Anyway, a child is found wandering in the desert by some New Mexico policemen, and they then discover a couple of forced-entry break-ins where the residents or shopkeepers are found dead, but nothing is stolen, although they do find a pile of loose sugar at each crime scene, along with a mysteriously shaped footprint. Naturally, it's a long time before they're able to put the pieces together and come up with "giant ants", because who the hell knows what shape an ant's leg is? The FBI is called in, and so is the country's leading ant expert, whose knowledge of ant society becomes instrumental in determining whether there might be queens spreading to new nests in order to lay more eggs.
Oh, and the ants are super-strong, of course, and have suddenly developed a taste for human flesh, because that means they're a threat to society and must be eliminated, despite the fact that our radiation created them in the first place, so the ants aren't really at fault here. It's the human invention of atomic weapons, and the desert testing that created the giant ants, so that means they're connected to the American guilt for dropping the atomic bombs in World War II. We did feel guilty about that, right? Just checking.
A task force is quickly formed, and though everyone present is briefed on the social habits of ants and their likely behavior, what does all that matter when the proposed solution for dealing with them is "Kill Them With Fire"? In fact, this is the third film in a row where that solution comes in handy - burning the villain down in his lair is starting to feel like a huge cop-out for when the screenwriter can't think up an original ending and needs to wrap things up so he can move on to the next screenplay.
Also starring James Whitmore (last seen in "Who Was That Lady?"), Edmund Gwenn (last seen in "The Trouble With Harry"), Joan Weldon, Onslow Stevens (last seen in "The Three Musketeers" (1935)), Sean McClory (last seen in "Bandolero!"), Chris Drake, Sandy Descher, Mary Alan Hokanson, Don Shelton (last seen in "Somebody Up There Likes Me"), Fess Parker (last heard in "Harvey"), Olin Howland, Richard Deacon (last seen in "Kiss Them For Me"), Ann Doran (last seen in "You Can't Take It With You"), with cameos from Dub Taylor (also last seen in "You Can't Take It With You"), Leonard Nimoy (last seen in "For the Love of Spock"), Dick York.
RATING: 4 out of 10 Wilhelm screams
No comments:
Post a Comment