Somebody I know once watched an ant carrying an impossibly large cake crumb. This person was very impressed and wondered aloud how much honey the ants in the hive might make from that. After a pause, the rest of us broke out in hysterical laughter, though it is easy to make the logical fallacy that bees like sugar, ants like sugar, and bees make honey, therefore, ants make honey. A bit of web research revealed there are honeypot ants which, indeed, produce honey. Though those ants aren’t in the part of the country in which I live, the joke’s still a bit on those of us who laughed.
Sugar plays a part in 1977’s Empire of the Ants, where giant versions of the insect terrorize various people. This is courtesy of Bert I. Gordon, who twenty years earlier directed Beginning of the End. That had an invasion of giant grasshoppers, which were just the normal variety, but walking around on cityscapes which are still photographs. All too frequently, one of those bugs would step out into nothing, as if they could walk on the sky. The same thing keeps happening here, even when effects technology had improved so much in the intervening years.
Lamentably, the quality of the storytelling is also unimproved. The 1957 picture was laughable but still moved at a fairly brisk pace. I thought the 1977 movie would similarly be little more than people vs giant ants. Alas, that is roughly the first act, then the film goes in a direction I completely did not anticipate. That said, just because the trajectory of the third act is highly novel does not mean it is good. And it follows that new course very slowwwly.
Even that first act is initially lethargic, as it establishes various characters who are only together because they have been lured by the free food and booze provided by Joan Collins’s firm which is trying to sell to rubes undesirable plots on an island. Everybody was brought there on a boat captained by Robert Lansing. Keep in mind this is an island.
These characters are so ineptly and barely defined that I never felt I had a grasp on more than a couple of them. I initially mistook three guys for each other, and all of them somehow look like a cross between Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson. Jacqueline Scott is the closest to being a fully-fledged human, with a backstory of her tactless layoff from the office to which she had devoted her life. Pamela Susan Shoop is close to being fully formed, if only because she gets so much screentime, and I suspect that was largely because she photographs well.
Collins seems out of place here, and I wonder what motivated her to appear in this, aside from the paycheck. Once again, she is playing a dominating and oversexed woman, which, to the best I can tell, is the only type of role did. She delivers lines that could have been used in any one of her other productions. Consider this, to her boytoy: “Fortunately, you’re great in the sack. That’s why I pay you such a high salary.”
She doesn’t seem to do much to actually sell the properties, as she says the lots sell themselves. Excellent! No need to hire a boat and then provide all that free food and booze to prospective customers. There is actually a pretty good gag about how no improvements are in place yet, with one sign pointing the directions to the various attractions yet to be established, such as the future clubhouse, future pool, future tennis club, future golf course, future beach club. Is this place secretly Futureworld?
The only current feature, though Collins does not know it yet, are the giant, killer ants. Imagery during the opening credits leads one to believe they are result of barrels of radioactive waste dumped over the side of a boat. I felt it was suggested this happens in a short amount of time, yet that bizarre third act reveals either that happened a long time ago or something else has created these monstrous insects. Also, given the ubiquity of the word radioactive, if there such a thing as radiodormant?
The effects are largely terrible. There is some failed bluescreen work, but I can sympathize with somebody trying to accomplish that with something as small as an ant. Various shot compositing tries to convince us humans and ants are side-by-side but it is never convincing. These moments are especially odd in that the ants just appear to be doing their own thing, as I suspect they don’t take direction very well. In close-ups of the attacks on humans, deliriously bad puppets of ants parts are employed. Such moments are simultaneously the high and low moments of the runtime.
One such attack is when one leaps onto the boat upon which everybody arrived. Lansing swims out to the boat, cuts it loose, and sets it on fire. That may have killed one ant, but it also destroyed their only means of escaping what is, again, an island. I would have loved to hear Lansing’s defense of his actions after he swims back to shore and rejoins the others.
The only defense the group has against the monster is maintaining a fire. When rain extinguishes that, most of the group runs in the forest. Collins attempts to find shelter in one of the buildings which have been right there behind them the entire time, yet nobody apparently thought to barricade themselves in one of those the long night before. gmail
The survivors all end up on a boat making a slow journey up a lazy river. The pacing of the film slows down to match that, making this long trip feel like it takes place in real time. Without ever having to venture into open water, our heroes find themselves in a fair-size town, complete with sugar refinery. It is no surprise that location exists, nor that it is a part of an explosive finale that somehow still isn’t very impressive.
Most confusing to me is that if A) everybody had to take a boat across open water to this “island”, B) the cast takes a long boat ride while on that island, and C) they do not cross open water on that journey, then this island is impossibly huge. I have seen many movies where the cast conveniently contracts or expands as needed, but never have I seen a geographic area to do that, let alone to this extent.
Empire of the Ants suggests Bert I. Gordon had not progressed as a filmmaker since Beginning of the End, yet he did make some good picture in the two decades separating those films. Alas, this 1977 film is barely even camp entertainment, with not enough of people directly fighting giant ants, which is on it needed to do. This is a movie that only needed to do what it says on the tin (or, in this case, sugar bag). Music cues throughout are similar to Jaws, especially in a recurring two-note piano motif. If they wanted to do that, then fine. I say this needs a massive reedit to make it exclusively man vs. ant action, and change the title to Mandibles.
Dir: Bert I. Gordon
Starring Joan Collins, Robert Lansing
Watched on Kino Lorber blu-ray