Picture Imperfect
Before the press blamed the Gorbals vampire hysteria on comic books, they targeted horror films. The problem was, they couldn’t make their case stick. There were only two creature features screening locally—and neither featured the undead…
Devil Girl from Mars tells the sorry tale of a leather-clad alien dominatrix who takes the customers of a Scottish inn hostage with the aid of her cardboard robot. Her fiendish plan is to use the men as breeding stock to repopulate her planet. This jaw-droppingly awful British B-movie asks us to believe that Scotsmen would regard a compulsory pub lock-in and the chance of unlimited how’s your
father as bad ideas.
By way of contrast, Them! is a bona fide classic. True, this story of giant radioactive ants suffers from some clumsy special effects, but it remains a compelling study in Cold War paranoia. One way of reading the film is that the rampaging insects represent Communism, but it’s equally valid to interpret it as critique of America’s use of the atomic bomb. Fear of science, fear of nature and
fear of humanity itself all combine with Warner Brothers’ trademark grit to create a memorable chiller.
If one thing unites these very different films, it’s that they both reflect a society ill at ease with itself, one afraid of what the future might bring. As cartographers used to write when marking uncharted territory: “Here Be Monsters.”
by Andrew J. Wilson
