Empire of the Ants (1977)

Joan Collins stars in this hilarious giant bug epic. Producer-director Bert I. Gordon, the genius behind such stuff-grows-really-big films as The Amazing Colossal Man and Village of the Giants, brings us a cautionary tale of what can happen when pollution, real-estate scams, and social insects mix. Collins, an absolute portrait of the valiant trouper who keeps plugging away no matter how bad the script gets, stars as shady land developer Marilyn Fryer. Marilyn is by only a small margin the sleaziest of a band of characters so repellent it's hard not to root for the ants (who, by the way, grow really big). A ludicrous plot and jaw-droppingly bad dialogue make Empire of the Ants ideal for late-night viewing. Watch it with your most vicious circle of friends. DVD version includes the original trailer and French and Spanish subtitles. -Ali Davis Amazon.com

Empire of the Ants Video

I bought this tape for my mother, she loves all these old horror movies, though I have seen it before, I enjoyed watching it again & mother loved it. August 31, 2008

Serve up one plate of cheesiness!! This movie is the best!

Quick plot synopsis of "Empire of the Ants!"....
A bunch of cheapskates go with Joan Collins on a real estate, timeshare sort of all-expense-paid cruise to a remote island. Of course, no one on the trip actually intends to buy the real estate. They just want free booze and to sneak a peak at Joan Collins' caboose!
They go to the island and, little do they know that toxic waste recently fell of a government barge into the water coming ashore. This toxic waste mutates some ants. Do ants usually travel so far into the sand toward the coming tide of water? Anyway....they get mutated, turn into monster ants, and kill of the cheapskates one by one.

Before reading on, you must ask yourself some questions...
Do you enjoy watching elderly people get devoured by ants?
Do you like watching a has-been British snob of an actress boss people around?
Do you like watching Jacqueline Scott, a really corney actress, hit on Robert Lansing, who doesn't have the slightest interest in her, understandably!?
Do you mind seeing Pamela Shoop? Of course not, that's a stupid question. What a 70's hottie!
Do you think you can stand watching enormous, fake-looking props made of cardboard and painted plastic that are supposed to be ant mandables and arms?
How about an entire town that has been brainwashed by the ants into becoming their slaves through pheremone chemical suggestion?

If the answer is "yes," you're good to go! Of course, there's a dude named Larry who is a real WEASLE throughout the movie. Robert Pine plays Larry. Robert Pine was the chief on "Chips," the tv cop show in the 70's. Well, Larry is such a chicken to help his wife that he lets the ants eat her rather than try and save her life. Great guy! Jeez.

Check out this movie; it's fun.... May 28, 2007

Laughably bad

This is terrible. Thank goodness the Midnight Movies DVD release had the sense to dress up the cover with shlocky artwork that encourages you to enjoy the cheesier aspects of the film rather than the drama, because as a serious monster movie, it fails pretty solidly. Joan Collins leads the not-so-star cast in a tale of rampaging giant ants, grown huge on eating radioactive waste and overrunning a remote swampland location where Joan is leading a guided tour of prospective real-estate purchasers. The ants have grown to the size of horses and they aren't shy about attacking, so it's a fight for survival as the terrified humans try and escape the ant-filled swamp.

The cast are all pretty forgettable, and even Joan Collins does little with her (admittedly 2-dimensional) part. Playing the part of a haughty, manipulative schemer is one of her proven abilities, and she performs adequately and it is always nice to see her strutting and sniping while she's onscreen. Unfortunately her acting skills fail her when she is called upon to cower in terror in the face of giant ants, but then, none of the cast manage to pull this off realistically with the very poor special effects that have to contend with. And of course its giant ants we have paid to see, so after half an hour of very obvious character setting dialogue and strolling about, we are ready to cheer as we finally see the first giant ants attack....oh dear.

Well, it's not good. The ants are presented on screen in two ways, either in magnified footage of real ants performing on tiny sets, or giant fake prop ants bumping into the live actors for the attack close ups. The shots with real ants are sometimes blended together with shots of the actors which looks really bad on-screen, and you can see the dividing lines between the composite images almost every time. If this had been done flawlessly, the film would have looked great during these sequences because the close up ant footage is quite good, and on certain occasions the joins are not all visible (the old couple who find themselves surrounded when emerging from a small hut is quite a good example), but these good scenes are nearly always spoiled by the actors being required to stand rooted to the spot in case they unwittingly step outside of the patch of screen they are contained in, while the ants similarly rattle around in their portion of the screen, and the two sides never touch each other.

The giant fake ants are another matter entirely. Big cumbersome props of giant ant heads and a couple of the front legs are pushed and poked at the screaming actors who seem to fall to the ground and become magically covered in blood without making even the slightest effort to get out of the way. This is most glaringly apparent in the very first ant-attack, when a man urges his wife to run away, only to remain standing completely still himself, waiting to be eaten. Whats worse is that every (and I mean EVERY) scene involving the fake giant ants attacking people is filmed with a wildy flailing camera that is constantly swinging in all direction, obviously done to avoid showing the dummy giant ants too clearly and for too long. It's intensely irritating, but you can easily see why the director did it, as the model ants are pretty bad. They don't resemble the live ants very well, especially as they have big tufts of ginger hair all over them! Oh yes and they also make loud, electronic-sounding noises all the time...of course, because real ants are noted for the very loud chirruping, whirring noises they make, aren't they? And later on in the film, they also scream, which I thought had to be one of the female cast members when i first heard it, but no, it's the ants, yelling out and generally overacting more than the human cast.

There's plenty more lame plot, effects and twists to come before the end of the film, and all of it done with a really rotten script and some very daft plot devices. Right at the start of the attack, the captain of the small boat that brought the tourists decides to BLOW-UP the vessel - just because a couple of ants have jumped aboard! Surely any rightminded captain would think of a way to get them off and use the boat to escape rather than scupper it immediately...it's not even out at sea, just tethered to a small jetty. As soon as I saw this scene, my little remaining respect for the script went right down the pan, and I realised I might as well steel myself for plenty more lapses in logic to start cropping up - and they did, countless times.

This film is a dud of magnificent proportions, and to think I actually went to the theatre to watch it when it was released in the late 1970's. As a kid, I thought the giant ants were cool, but I must have missed all the awful script inconsistencies and poor acting. Some of the film is bad enough to be genuinely funny, so if you are thinking of watching it, get ready to laugh, because there's nothing remotely scary or dramatic going on here. July 5, 2006

Empire of the Brainless

Perhaps the synopsis should be reversed. It should read, "Will the leaders of giant ant community succeed in enslaving these obnoxious human beings? Will the ants be able to eat the humans without having indigestion?"

If one were to look up the word "stupid movie" in the dictionary, you'd see the words "Empire of the Ants" right underneath it as the definition.

If you want good acting and a very suspenseful plot, watch something else!

If you want to watch the dictionary definition of "stupid", watch this!


September 23, 2005

Not your typical scary horror film.

Review by the students enrolled in ENT 201, Insects on Film, Clemson University, Spring 2005.

Empire of the Ants, is not your typical, scary horror film. I understand that this film was made in 1977, but even Godzilla was scarier than this movie. This movie is a balance between sci-fi and comedy. It stars Joan Collins as a self-centered real estate agent in the process of selling swampland, in the form of a soon-to-be resort, to potential buyers. Only towards the end of the movie does the director throw in a little suspicion to try and keep the viewers interested. On the other hand, I did find a little humor in the film and if compared to movies similar to, Beginning of the End, it was not that bad.

The movie begins with Marilyn, the owner of Dreamland Shores, taking a boat load of potential buyers to see her "overpriced swampland". On the island she tries to wheel and deal her customers into buying land by giving them free liquor and food. Little do these people know, Dreamland Shores is infested with gigantic, people eating ants that have been eating toxic waste that washed ashore. One by one the ants pick off some of the buyers leaving only six of them to escape the ants and reach safety in a near by town. Once they arrive in the town they begin to notice little things that seem very strange. Only about one-third of the group makes it to the town, where none of the locals seem concerned about the ants. As they try to escape they are captured again and this time they are taken to the sugar refinery only to find out that the inhabitants of the town are being hypnotized by the queen ant. Now, their only chance at surviving is by crossing a river and going to a local town. The fear that they might become slaves to a queen ant provokes Don, the boat captain, to shoot a flare at the queen allowing him and the rest of his crew to escape, except for Marilyn who was hypnotized before she could escape. Upon escaping, John, who is only along for the free food and drinks, drives a gas truck around the sugar refinery and sets fire to it which kills the ants.

The downsides to this film were that some of the scenes were used over and over again, and there was a good bit of foreshadowing in the film. Although the scenery was cheesy, the entomology facts were correct in some parts of the movie. The queen ant in the movie uses pheromones to gain power over the town's people, which is similar to how queen ants in real life gain power over other ants; I guess that the same scenes were used over and over in order to save money or to save time. This might help out while shooting the film but in the end it makes for a poorly produced movie. The foreshadowing in the film makes it hard to get interested at first. Once the six characters make it safely to the town, the foreshadowing stops and a bit of suspicion are thrown in and this is where the film gets a little interesting.

Looking at the scientific side of the film also helps to redeem this film's rating. The ants in the movie portrayed correctly. There are around 20,000 species of ants; 570 species exist just in the U.S. In each species, there are three types of ants: the queen, the sterile females, and the males. Ants have inhabited Planet Earth for 100 million years. They were shown as being everywhere, in every direction that you turn, and when shown up close you could tell that they have hair. In the movie, the queen ant controls the town and all the people in the town. On the scientific side of ants there are three types of ants: the queen, males, and workers. Of these three types of ants the queen controls the males and the workers.

Aside from labeling this film a horror and by not overlooking the downsides makes it easier to say that this movie is not a great film. . The actors/actresses did a good job of playing the roles of the scared visitors and the ant controlled town's people. The music selection was great for portraying the mood, feelings, and emotions throughout the movie. By looking at the end of the movie and the scientific side of the film you can see that there was not much time or energy put into making this movie. This movie was all together informative and somewhat entertaining for a 1977 flick!
March 2, 2005

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