Skip to main content

Empire of the Ants (1977) - Bert Gordon


Empire of the Ants is a celebration of old 50's Monster Movies and how the genre was absolutely terrible. You have ants that are blown up and superimposed in the background and actors that have to "fake it" the entire time. The movie is really awful and got progressively worse through out its duration. Some of the scenes with the monster ants are painful to watch, really, they are that horrible.

How does this happen? How can you cast veteran actors like Joan Collins (Dynasty) and Robert Lansing (Kung Fu: The Legend Continues) to star in a huge piece of crap like this? Well I guess its not hard, just offer them most of the money that you have been allotted to make the picture. Other than Joan and Robert the rest of the actors are laughable at best; to the point where I was actually relieved when certain cast members were killed. But, that's just one of the problems with the movie.

The movie is loosely based on a short story by H.G. Wells. It's main focus is on a group of tourists on a timeshare tour when they run into a bunch of radiated and mutated ants. Funny thing about the movie is that the ants are never the same size; they grow and shrink depending on the scene. In some cases Ants are as big as dump trucks, in others they are about the size of an average man. The director had trouble controlling the ants so in some scenes you have ants crawling on the sky or trying to climb up the sides of a tiny set. Its pretty eff'ng hilarious.

There is nothing in this movie that makes it actually scary, it is just a terrible film. I dare anyone to watch this movie and tell me that it was amazing! You couldn't! Its hard to fathom how this movie even made it to the big screen. And so I give this movie a 2 out of 10. It made me chuckle, and if you want to fit this one into a movie marathon I would sandwich this in between Eaten Alive and the original The Crazies.

I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords

S!D

  • For promotion for the movie, theaters would have ant-farms in their lobbies. 
  • The special effects are all just magnified shots of Bullet Ants.
  • There is a scene with ants walking on a pier to destroy a boat that is used in “It’s Tough to Be a Bug!” at Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Florida and Disney’s California Adventure in California.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ju-On (2000) - Takashi Shimizu

Watching Japanese horror is similar to watching British comedy. If you enjoy dry whit then you probably enjoy the boys of Monty Python in drag. That's the joke, they're dressed like women. Get it? Well, that's British humor. But if you're like most Americans you probably prefer Adam Sandler farting his way across a football field and hooking up with chicks that are way out of his league. Americans usually prefer this more in your face, crass brand of humor. My point is funny in England is different from funny in the US. The same goes for J-Horror. What the Japanese consider scary is very different from what Americans consider scary and it shows in this horror film. Japanese horror is generally slow (a little too slow sometimes), suspenseful and creepy. Ju-On is a creepy effing film. The movie has almost no soundtrack. It is incredibly suspenseful and the pay-offs are pretty awesome, but I think that it was done better in the American version (cultural t

Spookies (1986) - Genie Joseph, Thomas Doran, and Brendan Faulkner

It's impossible to get a decent movie when you take two films and just squash them together. That is essentially the story of how this movie came together. The film started as Twisted Souls. However, according to the financial backer they didn't have enough horror. So they ended up hiring another guy to come in and add a monster in virtually every scene.  This movie started out being directed by Brendan Faulkner and Thomas Doran. It basically is the tale of two sets of teenagers that arrive to a strange building surrounded by a strange cemetery. It was your usual tale of teenagers in a big hows with a few monsters. Then they brought in Genie Joseph and added even more. Like a haunted birthday party, a murderous cat-man, zombies, and an old wizard. It really became a smorgasbord of horror with a very thin plot-line leading it around. This movie is hard to summarize in a conventional way. It just packs so much.  The most interesting part of this movie are defini

Le Diable au Convent (1899) - George Melies

Le Diable au Convent is longer than the two previous Georges Méliès ventures into short form horror. This particular French short shows the Devil himself running a convent and terrorizing the poor old nuns that live there. However he is finally vanquished by the good of Faith. This is yet another Méliès classic, showcasing the art work that really goes into his short film-making. This is one of the earliest examples of a horror movie that could rely on its elaborate set design and artistic design. Everything in this film, although horribly aged, has been packaged extremely well. If you are a fan of production and set design then I would highly recommend just about anything that Melies has his name on. Though nothing that is considered too extreme actually happens, Satan does have his way with a convent. The satanic imagery itself must have kept this film on the traveling carnival circuit. It certainly wouldn’t fit into the good moral bag that society shoved itself into back in