The Monsters

The Monsters Gog (Ivan Tors; United Artists) is a tidy, legless little robot with five arms, a beer-barrel belly, and a head like a chrome-plated grapefruit with a gleaming red aerial on top. Gog is married--or something--to another robot named Magog, and they both work in a highly secret space-research institute, hidden somewhere underneath the great American desert, which Herbert Marshall runs for the Government.

Gog's boss is an electronic brain called Novac (Nuclear Operative Variable Automatic Computer), but Novac is a security risk. Into the brain an agent of The Enemy has built a secret radio receiver through which Novae can be indoctrinated with treasonable ideas beamed in from a jet plane that keeps whizzing through the stratosphere overhead.

On orders from Novac, Gog and Magog prowl soundlessly about on their rubber tank treads indifferently slaughtering scientists, until at last they are caught in the act of messing up the safety controls in an atomic pile. They are then deactivated with a flamethrower wielded by a daring young security agent (Richard Egan) in defense of a beautiful female scientist (Constance Dowling).

Audiences are not likely to be convinced by the ending. As most of the actors draggle through their paces, it is plain that Novac and friends could easily outwit the lot of them.

Them (Warner) are ants, but not the kind one usually shares a picnic with. Caught in a radioactive fallout from an atomic-test explosion at Alamogordo, a desert colony of Camponotus vicinus has suffered mutation into a race of creatures more than ten feet long. They are discovered by Myrmecologist Edmund Gwenn after two people disappear in the desert and two others are found dead with their carcasses full of formic acid.

It's off again with another security agent (James Arness) and a beautiful female scientist (Joan Weldon) to hunt the horrors out. The hunters pump the anthill full of cyanide gas, and then go stalking through a giant welter of tunnels in search of survivors. Two queen ants, they discover, have flown the nest. Aghast, the entomologist rushes to Washington to tell an emergency meeting of VIPs that if the queens succeed in breeding a new generation, "man will probably be extinct within nine months."

One of the queens builds her nest in the hold of a freighter, but is destroyed when the ship is sunk by naval gunfire. When the other and her brood are traced to the 700 miles of sewer conduit that crisscross beneath metropolitan Los Angeles, martial law is declared, and a jeep-borne army contingent roars in to wipe the things out.

The acting is rather more believable in Them than in Gog, but then so are the monsters. Hairy brutes they are, with just that expression of chinless, bulge-eyed evil that Peter Lorre has been trying all these years to achieve.

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