Them!

April 27, 2005

A great giant-insect SF film. Tightly scripted, nicely acted, with some surprisingly good characterizations by James Whitmore and James Arness as a local cop and an FBI man who join forces to solve a series of violent events. The eccentric scientist and his beautiful daughter may be stock figures, but here they play a real role in the story instead of being there for solely for laughs and leers. In its own low-budget way, a classic.

A minor classic. Maybe the first, definitely one of the best films of the "giant insect" genre. Best part: the investigation of a series of brutal killings in the desert by an FBI agent and a local cop. The monsters themselves are nothing special. It's the characters that make this film work, and that is a rare thing in cinema SF.