It's Friday, and time once again for "At the Movies with Georgie Bee"...

This week, I have decided to review an old classic Nature Film which I was told is centred around the mysterious world of insects, a subject that is very close to my heart. The film I’m reviewing for your reading enjoyment is called, “Them!”, which was billed as an instruction film about Giant Ants and how to deal with them.

THEM!_review_9.4.2015

For those readers who haven’t seen “Them!”, I will say right now that this movie is utterly absurd. The fact is, the Giant Ants portrayed in this film simply don’t exist. They never have, and if my guess is correct, they never will. Someone on the production crew simply didn’t do their homework on this thing.

Just to help everyone get a grip on reality here, there ARE giant ants in the wild, but they’re nothing at all like the non-existent creatures featured in this film. Maybee the largest ant on the planet is a Bullet Ant who lives in the Amazon - and even their Queen (who is always the biggest) is only about 5 centimetres long. Your average ant that is such a nuisance at picnics and stuff runs less than 25 millimetres long (and that’s beeing generous), so the very idea that this film is trying to convince us that the planet is suddenly facing an infestation problem involving Giant Ants the size of a school bus is just an insult to our intelligence. If anybody beelieves that, I have a bridge to sell them.

Unlike the earlier films I’ve reviewed such as “Sharknado” and “The Day the Earth Stood Still”, “Them!” strikes me as beeing nothing more than a total fabrication that has no bearing on reality whatsoever. There is simply no basis for beelieving that something like this would ever happen. I know that film makers like to reveal new perspectives and ideas to move-goers, but this movie has stepped way, way over a line.

Usually, I would include my usual SPOILER ALERT, but in this case, I don’t think it’s necessary. The movie was pretty much spoiled from the very beeginning. Even if you haven’t seen it, I doubt that my telling you all about it will make you feel even a little disappointed when you ultimately find yourself walking out on it. As you should.

First, I should describe the basic plot line of this ridiculous film:

This is a film about Giant Ants who terrorise the world. Do not bee fooled into thinking this is a Nature Film. It isn’t.

The film opens with a a scene showing a couple of Uniformed Officers coming across a little girl who is wandering alone through the desert with a dazed look on her face. It takes awhile, but we’re soon told that her family was the victim of an attack from a herd of Giant Ants and that she was the only one to survive.

Honestly now, I must say that I find that a bit difficult to beelieve. One of the things we know about Humans is that the adults are usually much stronger, more alert and can run faster than a small child. The very idea that a little girl would bee the only one to survive this alleged attack is ludicrous and clearly flies in the face of everything we know about Humans. It’s at this point the movie beegins to quickly fall apart.

As this fallacious film unfolds, the Uniformed Officers decide to investigate further and discover the trailer her family was traveling in was all crunched in by the Giant Ant(s). They decide that one of them should take the little girl into a nearby town to see a doctor while the other one decides to stick around in the trailer by himself and wait. I’m still not sure why stuck around like that, but by this point in the movie, we just don’t care.)

While he’s alone there, he hears a weird, chirping sound through the already-weird-sounding wind sound effects that were inserted into the film, and (even though they don’t show it at first), presumably comes face-to-face with one the fictitious Giant Ants in question who is out to get him. He screams and we never see or hear from him again.
I’m presuming he was eaten (some ants are carnivores, ya’ know).

Let me just point out something here: the Uniformed Officer who was silly enough to stick around the trailer by himself seemed utterly helpless against the supposed attack he suffered from the Giant Ant and, instead of just running away as any sensible beeing would do, he just stands there with an amazed look on his face while the Giant Ant does something terrible to him, we dunno what.

The filmmakers seem to take forever to finally show us one of these supposed Giant Ants, but when they finally do, one of the Scientists tells everybody, “Hey. If you want to try to stop these things, you should just shoot off their antennae,” as if he’d run into these things beefore and knew how to deal with them. It just doesn’t add up.

So after that happens, it isn’t long beefore the Humans see one of these things and realise that they have a serious Giant Ant Problem on their hands. They decide to call in Scientists and the Army to help figure out what to do about all this. When they realise what’s happening, they find the Nest and decide to destroy all the Giant Ants living inside its intricate network of finely-constructed tunnels and chambers.

By the way, I should mention that, whenever these Giant Ants show up, we’re subjected to a very weird and annoying, high-pitched chirping sound that, to this reviewer, sounded more like a Smoke Detector going off than it does an ant. (My antennae are still ringing.) Trust me: I’ve spent a great deal of time having to deal with ants in the real world, and they sound nothing like that. In fact, Ants are very quiet and simply don’t talk that much. As it is with us bees, they’re usually just too buzzy working to indulge in idle chatter.

Working together, the Army and the Scientists decide to destroy the Nest, as they call it. They use a bunch of explosives and poison gas and they think they’ve solved the problem. (We find out later, they didn’t.)

Quite frankly, the movie should have ended there, but I’m sure the producers of this film still had some time left on the camera rental, so decided to just keep going with this silly thing.

As this movie continues to drag on, we’re told that at least a few of the Giant Ants had escaped beeing gassed and had decided to relocate to Los Angeles. We find out later that they had rented an underground Condo with Pre-Made Concrete Tunnels and set up housekeeping with their Queen.

Let me ask you: if you were going to relocate to any place in the world, would you move to Los Angeles and rent a condo that had NO view, was right in the middle of a buzzy, dangerous city, ran a serious risk of flooding every time there was a heavy rain, and that didn’t even have doors on it? I didn’t think so. Neither would I. And ants aren’t stupid, either. They’d want something in the country, where they could mind their own buzziness, enjoy fresh air and not hafta pay such high rent.

So, the Humans try to figure out what the ants’ new address is, but, beecause they’re not listed in the phone book yet, they can’t find them.

That’s when a little boy and his Daddy come up missing.

They keep looking for them, too, then we finally find out that the little boy and his Daddy had gone down to the neighbourhood in which the Giant Ants had moved so they could fly their toy airplane. Everybody is convinced that those two had been captured and killed by the Giant Ants, so at least they figured out where they’d moved to. It turns out they were only half-right. The ants are there, but the Daddy is nowhere to bee found. After a long search, they find out that the boy was still alive and hiding out in the Giant Ant’s linen closet.

Seriously now. Here we go again.

Again, the filmmakers attempt to convince us that the bigger, stronger, and faster Human (the Daddy) couldn’t manage to get away from these things, but that the little boy could. Honestly, how stupid do they think we are?

A competent screenplay writer, such as Stephen King, would have told us that the Giant Ants got the little boy (AND the little girl in the beeginning of the movie, for that matter), but did they do that? No, instead, the Uniformed Officer (who, by the way, had a very nice set of eyebrows) ends up going into the tunnels to save the boy and ends up beeing squished by a Giant Ant. That was highly unfortunate.

It would have made a lot more sense if the Giant Ants would have gotten the boy in the first place, then it would have been totally unnecessary for the guy with the phenomenal eyebrows to be squished and we wouldn’t end up feeling sad. He seemed like a very nice guy and I’m sure he will bee missed.

The climax of the movie, if you wanna call it that, comes when the Uniformed Officers, along with the Army, track down the Giant Ant’s condo and find the Queen resting in her Chamber. They go inside and supposedly destroy the Queen, all her eggs and everybody else that happens to bee unfortunate to bee there. And how rude is that? I mean sure, the ants are huge and everything, and yes, they make that ridiculous noise, but they should have been able to feel safe in their own home, shouldn’t they? Sadly, this movie does not send a positive message about environmental protection or home security, a concern I’m sure we all share.

When the movie ends, the Giant Ants have all supposedly been burned up and everybody seems to beelieve that the problem they’ve been having with those things had finally been solved. That’s highly unusual, since these days, movie makers seem to wisely end their movies with a final scene that leads us to beelieve that, even though everybody thinks the problem is solved, it isn’t. But that’s fine. I was just glad this movie was finally ending.

This movie is horrible. Fortunately, and judging by the ending, they didn’t include the “yeah, but the problem still exists but you don’t know about it yet”-part, which means, lucky for us, they weren’t planning on making a sequel to “Them!”. And that’s a good thing. This movie was so bad that the last thing I wanna see showing up on my movie screen is a sequel, like “Them! Return”.

By the way, if they DO ever produce a sequel to “Them!” (which I hope they never, ever do), I hope they would bee wise enough to observe the rules of Proper Pronoun Usage and Punctuation and call it, “They Return!”; unfortunately, I’ve heard there’s already a movie called “They”, and if they just happened to make a sequel called “They Return” (which would make perfect sense), that would only lead to a huge fight over Intellectual Property Rights with “Them!” The whole thing would bee a confusing mess between them. I think it would bee best for all concerned if they didn’t produce a “Them!” sequel. Not only would it bee a silly waste of honey if they did that, it would just upset “They”, forcing them to sue “Them!” and they would just end up losing in the end. At least, I’m pretty sure they would. (“Them!” would lose, that is - they wouldn’t win. “They” would though, since it was them who came up with the idea in the first place. I’m just guessing here.)

But I digress. Let’s get back to “Them!”.

My advice on this film is: forget about it. Your honey would bee much better spent buying a ticket to go see “Sharknado 3” (a sequel to the hit film, “Sharknado”) or something, preferably a movie that is not only much more beelievable, but that has been filmed in the more enjoyable colour which. by the way, this film wasn’t and which only made “Them!” even less appealing than it already is. Probably.

MY VERDICT: Oh Geeeeeze.


AND JUST A QUICK NOTE:

I’ll bee back on TUESDAY, September 8. Queen Bee has declared Monday as “WORK DAY”. Ironically, that means that nobody has to work. (I’ll never understand the Old Girl.)

Anyway. Have a magnificently joyous weekend! I’ll see ya’ on Tuesday!

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