The elements of this year’s three “SYFY Movie Nights” films include giant ants, mutants and the consequences of communicating with Mars—each film is from the 1950s, and in addition to
Them! Though Gordon Douglas’ 1954 monster movie Them! tells a far more quiet, intimate story than its modern descendants, one of the first ways it clues you in to the danger its human heroes are in is a haunting, piercing noise that calls out from the wilderness. Advertisement When sergeant Ben Peterson (James Whitmore) and army soldier Ed Blackburn (Chris Drake) stumble upon a little girl (Sandy Descher) wandering around the New Mexico desert alone, the men can tell from the child’s catatonic state that something’s gone terribly wrong. Because she isn’t capable of speaking due to whatever she’d been through, though, Peterson and Blackburn aren’t initially aware of the situation at hand as they take it upon themselves to search for the girl’s family. Where many modern monster movies’focus on kids trying to reunite with their parents ends up becoming a distraction,
In the groundbreaking movie, Weldon played researcher Dr. Pat Medford, working alongside her scientist father, Dr. Harold Medford (Edmund Gwenn), to help the U.S. government get a handle on a deadly outbreak of enormous ants following their irradiated mutation from atomic testing at the Alamogordo, New Mexico nuclear facility. Regarded as one of the first “big bug” films in the nuclear-obsessed era of postwar speculative science fiction, Them! is still regarded by fans and movie buffs as a pioneer of the genre. Its black-and-white special effects may appear dated compared with the modern CG spectacles that fans have come to take for granted. But