Them! (1954)

Anyone who has watched more than one episode of Archer, the very funny animated show about a dysfunctional, and often drunk, secret agent, should be all too aware of what you can do to get ants. Sugar spillages, sweet treats left around, just wandering around making funny noises while waggling discarded car radio aerials from your head, all of these things can attract ants. It wasn't just Archer that told us about this though. Back in 1954 we had Them! to thank for alerting us to the ant menace. These weren't any normal ants either. They were gi-ants.

While the cast here includes James Whitmore as a Sergeant, Edmund Gwenn and Joan Weldon as two scientists who are also father and daughter, and James Arness, the real reason for watching Them! is the giant ants, which are actually shown onscreen earlier than I thought they would be. The film is presented as a mystery for a number of the early scenes, but all of the clues are there to point towards the kind of creatures shown on the movie poster. What begins in the desert landscape of New Mexico will end in the very different terrain of L. A. in a film that holds up as a classic of the "oversized beastie" sub-genre.

Based on a story by George Worthing Yates, adapted and worked into screenplay form by Russell S. Hughes and Ted Sherdeman, Them! benefits from great pacing, more ambition than many of these films would have in subsequent years, and moments of mayhem that, despite being dated, still hold some power when watched today. Director Gordon Douglas does well with material that could have easily been mishandled, keeping things nicely balanced between the mystery, thrills, and the exposition. There's an energy and momentum to the whole thing, and it's somehow also light enough without injecting any forced and eye-rolling humour into any of the main sequences.

Considering how long I waited to finally get around to this, even after finding out about some of the main plot beats and the excitement of the third act, I was expecting to come away from this slightly underwhelmed. That wasn't the case though. This remains very deserving of a special place in the hearts of film fans, and those who love it will struggle to find anything coming close to it. You can get a fantastic film full of normal-sized ants with Phase IV, but your decent overgrown ant movie choices really boil down to just Honey, I Shrunk The Kids and Empire Of The Ants . . . none of the other attempts to wander through this territory have worked for me.

Everyone who is into their monster movies has already seen this by now. I am surely the last. But if you're a newcomer to creature features, or if you've just delayed this for as long as I did, then I highly recommend it. From the concept to the finalised special effects, from the sound design to the spectacle, it's just an absolute winner from start to finish. Get this cast and crew in place . . . and THAT'S how you get ants.

8/10

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Saps At Sea (1940)

There are many Laurel & Hardy fans around the world, and rightly so. The two stand tall as one of the best comedy duos of all time. And I have barely scraped the surface of their filmography, despite treating myself to a nice boxset of their work some years ago. There are two reasons for that. First of all, so far, I don't love them quite as much as the other stars from that era (Chaplin, Keaton, and Harold Lloyd got to me first, and Abbott & Costello delivered verbal routines I am still impressed and amused by to this day). Second, they're not the easiest films to discuss and review. The plots are often very slight, and fans of the stars will already know much more about their work than I do.

As is so often the way, Stan and Ollie play, well, Stan and Ollie, this time around trying to keep themselves employed in a horn factory. Unfortunately, there's one horn that tends to drive workers into a nervous breakdown when it is tested too often, and this happens to Ollie, leading to a doctor ordering him to have a break. The two men treat themselves to some time on a small boat, but the peace is ruined by the presence of an escaped criminal.

Fans of the magnificent, and superior, Modern Times may already get the feeling that this is wandering through similar territory, and that's quite correct. That's not to say that one film was aiming to copy the other, however. It's just that factory roles made up a large part of the employment sector at that time. It's the same way now, although I hope that most people can work in slightly safer conditions, and watching films from this time can serve as a depressing reminder of how little progress we have really made when it comes to forcing workers to keep up with the optimum output of various machinery and automated processes.

With a quartet of reliable writers having worked on the screenplay, as well as input from our leads (of course), director Gordon Douglas, who did a lot of work with the "Little Rascals" before helming only a couple of Laurel & Hardy films, knows that he can generally sit back and relax while his stars make the material shine, and that's exactly what happens. Douglas doesn't do a bad job, and I don't want to minimise his contribution here, but a Laurel & Hardy movie rests on how often Laurel & Hardy create the laughs. This 56-minute feature has a very healthy gag rate.

As for the cast, Richard Cramer is suitably menacing as the dangerous escapee, Ben Turpin is good fun as a cross-eyed handyman, there's a goat added to the small ship's "crew" to add to the fun, and our leads are (as expected) effortlessly brilliant throughout. 

This is great fun for fans of the leads, but also could serve as a nice introduction for anyone who has yet to explore the rest of their filmography. I am not sure how it is viewed by those who are already familiar with the entire Laurel & Hardy filmography, but I thought this was pretty great.

8/10

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