When horror met entomology (sort of) the result was pretty fun...
I grew up with the giant bugs of the 1950s, seeing those
movies on Creature Feature on my local station in the 70s. "Creature Feature...fiendish films for Saturday night. Creature Feature!" went the ads.
Some of these movies were better, really, than they had any
right to be. Much credit goes to actors
and directors who played everything straight, adding drama to the silliness. Budgets and special effects varied widely (I
forget the name of the one where “giant” grasshoppers walk across photos of
buildings), and the cooperation of the military always helped, since seeing
tiny models of tanks and planes turns off even kids.
If filmmakers were using giant versions of
real bugs, they could do rear-projection effects, although it was pretty
obvious back then what was happening, and sometimes they made partial
practical-effects pieces like a claw, foot, or head.
The trend-setter, 1954’s Them! went to the trouble
of building some giant ants that weren’t nearly as bad as they could have been. It’s a decent movie in all respects, with the
best idea being the little girl, lost in the desert, parents can’t be found,
who reacts to the smell of formic acid by screaming “Them!”
The Deadly Mantis (1957) was another good
one, although you had to accept a mantis the size of a B-52 “thawing out” and
reviving in the Arctic and heading south, somehow hitting DC and New York on
the way (it died in New York, something countless performers can say.) The mantis first wipes out an Eskimo village,
a weird twist inasmuch as a disappearing Arctic village is claimed by Forteans
as something that actually happened.
Both movies (and most of their lesser imitators) had a handsome male scientist with a female daughter
(Them!) or assistant (Mantis), although Them! gets props for having the daughter
a scientist in her own right. Them! wins
on science, tossing in a few bits of real science on ants and radiation (indeed, one real scientist whose work was mentioned on screen threatened legal action, and the studio took the reference out) .
But both are fun – they still are. Give them a look sometime.
