The first time I ever saw Them!, my first thought was, oh THIS is where Cameron stole (cough) borrowed the scenes in the alien hive. Having seen Aliens before I saw Them!Walter Kittel said:
Then we just disagree.
I've seen sites, critics and publications classify them as such.
Well, that's certainly a view that's often promoted these days, but in the films themselves it's usually treated in a perfunctory manner, via brief opening montages of bomb-test stock-footage or in tech-babble exchanges between men in white smocks and military brass. It serves only to support at least a semblance of suspension of disbelief, so it's really just a MacGuffin: it's the thing that nobody in the film cares about but sets up the situation that they do care about and that takes up virtually the whole film: battling giant bugs.Walter Kittel said:
Well, I agree that the films are not feature length treatises on the perils of atomic energy and that yes, they do often merely set the stage for a bug-hunt, but I still find them to be more SF than horror. Having said that, I will qualify that statement by admitting that the slasher films from the '70s onward may have have 'reset' my horror genre expectations and if I were a viewer in 1950s my thinking on the genre classifications might have been different.
Indeed I don't even consider slasher films to be horror films. I tend to refer to them as gore films, as they seem to be more interested in grossing out the audience, than illiciting true horror. Interestingly the film that is often sited as having started the slasher genre, Halloween, has very little gore in it.Walter Kittel said:
Surely they have elements of both. In my opinion its the emphasis that makes the difference. Consider two films from the 1950's, Them! and Forbidden Planet. Both have giant monsters. In Them!, once we get past the notion that the ants are creations of atomic testing, the movie is mostly about how scary they are, and how much they can put the cast in danger. Forbidden Planet's monster is also scary, but the film makers are more interested in the nature of the beast. In fact the revelation, or twist at the end of the film is a rather deep sci-fi concept that makes you think about it after the film is over, rather than just keeping you up at night.TonyD said:
There is a lot of old disney I would buy on BD. 20k Leagues, Swiss Family Robinson, The Black Hole, Condorman...Vegas 1 said:
No one knows what it was like to see this movie in 70mm when it first ran...unless you were there. There was nothing like it ever...!Same for Superman and Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind...and of course Jaws.What can I say...it'll never be the same in anyones lifetime!!!
These "reports" were all purely speculative. There has been no official announcement and, even if there was (i.e. POLLYANNA, THE ABSENT-MINDED PROFESSOR), I would consider it with a toaster-size grain of salt.Mark Cappelletty said:
If I'm reading this correctly, they're taking the entire 2.66 negative, and squeezing it to 2.55, and then say it's how people saw it in 1954.
I really don't like camera distortion, they didn't intentionally add that, it was just as good as they had at the time, i have no problem with them fixing camera distortion or removing wires that take you out of the film, they would have done it back then if they had the technology. This is an example of technology being used to improve things, i say why not.seangood79 said:
