Some Movies Just Bug You
What is it about insects that makes them such excellent candidates for SF movie monsters? Okay, granted, they look really strange, with all those legs and their multi-faceted eyes and the various appendages of different species. Still, most of them seem to be relatively harmless, and all have some job to do maintaining the equilibrium of the environment, even if it's only cutting down on surplus population by infecting it with malaria.
Could it be simply that we know they already have us outnumbered, and that if they were to add significant size to that advantage we wouldn't have a prayer?
Whatever, the reason, SF moviemakers have used our arthropod brothers and sisters to create movies that run the gamut from genuinely nerve-wracking to pathetically stupid. In the rude, crude days of the Fifties, the majority of the multi-legged actors were the real thing, doing their damage using a combination of minatures and blue-screen. Now, the live performers are still used, but usually all they have to do is swarm here and there--computers handle the really hard stuff.
The first and arguably the best of these films is 1954's Them. Here, as in the majority of the subgenre, the culprit is atomic radiation. A nest of ants is irradiated during one of the early atomic bomb tests and the mutated results are the size of semis. Big Jim Arness, recovered from his earlier adventure as an alien turnip in The Thing from Another World, is on the white-hat side this time as the gallant knight in Army armor, assisted by the delightfully elfin Edmund Gwenn as the brilliant professor and Joan Weldon as his daughter/assistant and the obligatory love interest. What makes the now-cliched plot and characters still work after all these years is the restraint of both. These are giant ants, but that's all they are, and they act like ants. The same applies to the oversized grasshoppers in The Beginning of the End (1957), also the result of careless irradiation.
In Tarantula (1955), the other best-of-bugs movie of the era, the monster arachnid results not from the A-bomb but good intentions. Scientist Leo G. Carroll, desiring to find a way to eradicate hunger, experiments with a growth serum. One of his test subjects is--but you've already guessed that. Again, what makes this movie work is that the spider never acts like anything else. Well, that and the ending, in which a bit player by the name of Clint Eastwood douses the critter in napalm.
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