Empire of the Ants

(This post is part of the Seventh So Bad It’s Good Blogathon hosted by Taking Up Room)

As a kid, I wanted an ant farm, those see-through plastic dioramas where you sent away for the actual ants, but my mother put her foot down, no doubt envisioning the industrious little critters breaking free, multiplying by the hour, running amok in the kitchen, capsizing the sugar bowl and carrying off cookies.

In Empire of the Ants (1977), Joan Collins is Marilyn, a haughty, dishonest land developer taking prospective buyers on a boat trip to Dreamland Shores, a work-in-progress beachfront community, plying them with free booze to soften the hard sell of purchasing a plot of nowheresville Florida scrubland.

When we meet her, she’s belittling the boat’s grouchy skipper Dan (Robert Lansing) and working the dupes who’ve signed on for the trip: seniors Harry and Velma (there for the free lunch), the Lawsons (not well defined, therefore making them the first victims), the Grahams  (marital problems galore), Joe (recovering from a divorce), Coreen (recovering from an affair with a married man) and Margaret (fired from her job).

The boat barely docked, Larry Graham has cornered Coreen and begun unbuttoning her blouse (she knees him in the nuts), Joe and Coreen confess their sordid life stories to each other, Mr. Lawson discovers that pipes sticking out of the ground aren’t connected to anything, all while Harry and Velma are likely shoving sandwiches in her pocketbook for later.

Amidst everyone’s backstories, a barrel of radioactive waste dumped offshore have come up on the beach, leaking a silvery gunk that mutates ants coming into contact with it into giants.

Intent on ruining this picnic, the ants destroy the boat and start picking off members of the party as they run through the woods heading for a nearby river where a rowboat is moored, the trek made more treacherous by the ants following them along the banks. “They’re herding us like cattle,” Coreen realizes. Hey, at least the ants aren’t trying to milk them as they do with aphids.

The plucky survivors – Marilyn, Dan, Joe, Coreen and Margaret – reach a small town and apparent safety, only to learn its citizens are being sprayed with the queen’s pheromones, mind-controlling them into zombies dedicated to providing her colony with sugar from a local refinery.

Marilyn gets the pheromone treatment and possibly, in her final lucid moments, wonders why she never thought of using her own pheromones to convince people to buy into Dreamland Shores.

Dan defeats the queen using some road flares, and the refinery explodes, destroying the colony and snapping the sleepwalking townspeople awake.

The special effects (courtesy of director Bert I. Gordon, who lived up to his initials with such drive-in fare as giant grasshoppers in Beginning of the End (1957), oversized rats and wasps in The Food of the Gods (1975) and an army officer exposed to radiation who grows ten feet a day in The Amazing Colossal Man (1957)) are cheap and unconvincing, the worst offense being the live ants placed on a still photograph and filmed as they crawl around. If one ant seems to be inching off into the sky don’t worry, nobody will notice.

But where the special effects fail, the acting, along with the change-of-pace when the movie unexpectedly shifts into a “rural town with a secret” film (only with giant ants), moves things along briskly. The movie never bores.

“It seemed a certainty that this film would guarantee none of us would ever get a job again – such was the quality of the story, script and direction,” Joan Collins wrote in her autobiography. “But in November 1976 (when filming began in Florida) we considered ourselves lucky to be working at all.”

Like a prehistoric ant trapped forever in amber, Empire of the Ants captures a moment in time, one of leisure suits, puka shell necklaces, safari jackets, a police car chase that ends with one car sailing in slow motion into a pond, a nature-gone-wrong theme and the campiness that comes with pre-Dynasty Joan Collins movies.

In the hierarchy of cinematic ants, THEM! (1954), the first big bug movie, is arguably still the best. Empire of the Ants, meanwhile, is the most entertaining.

Tubi's secret history of film

There was a time when storefront video stores popped up, some seemingly overnight, across America. Beverly Hills Cop, Back to the Future and Top Gun brought in the traffic, but it was the weird stuff among their VHS inventory that often made these stores unique. We frequented a video store that included the 1975 Nazi-exploitation flick Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, and the barely remembered, and barely animated, Spunky and Tadpole cartoons. Their sun-faded boxes indicated they’d been sitting near the front window for a while and would remain there for some time to come.

Tubi is the ultimate mom-and-pop video store with endless shelves (more than 250,000 titles) of weather-worn B-movies, public domain television shows and drive-in fodder. Sometimes the prints are terrible – you almost expect the virtual projector to begin sputtering and the film to burst on fire – but there’s immediate, incredible variety and even if they don’t currently offer Ilsa or Spunky, a chance to finally view movies that for decades seemed to only be rumors (Candy, Chatterbox, Wonderwall).

Here are a few highlights from some recent Tubi viewing.

A joke that made the rounds in third grade concerned the first encounter between Tarzan and Jane. I’ll cut right to the punchline: “If I stick my plug in your socket, will your headlights turn on?” The level of humor in Carry On Camping (1969) isn’t quite that low, but it’s close.

Essentially a 90-minute Benny Hill skit of double entendres, sight gags, horny husbands and giggling virgins, it was the U.K.’s most popular box office movie in 1969, the seventeenth entry in the Carry On series, which ran from 1958 to 1992. The actors seem mostly unknown outside of the U.K., including the effete, reptilian Charles Hawtrey, the subject of a John Lennon ad lib on the Let It Be album (“I Dig a Pygmy by Charles Hawtrey and the Deaf-Aids”).

Charles Hawtrey 

Carry On Camping includes a sub-plot about a nudist camp, triggering an algorithm recommending Hideout in the Sun (1960). Brothers Duke and Steve Martin rob a bank, take Dorothy as a hostage, then hide in the “country club” where she works. Turns out it’s a nudist camp. While Duke sweats and smokes endless cigarettes, Steve and Dorothy swim, play volleyball and archery naked as the other campers (mostly women) innocently frolic and strike poses. Steve remarks that he’s never felt healthier.

Filmed in Miami, Duke eventually dies from a cobra bite at a roadside snake farm and Steve gives himself up, promising Dorothy to return for a shared lifetime of nude volleyball.

Somehow James Guercio, who’d produced Blood, Sweat and Tears, and Chicago, landed a gig directing Electra Glide in Blue (1973) starring Robert Blake as a motorcycle cop, a film with the same flaws of posturing and self-importance that made Chicago so hard to stomach. Blake aside, the acting is overblown, given to long, embarrassing scenes that recall high school drama class exercises. The finale, in which Blake is shot off his motorcycle by two hippies in some sort of reverse reference to the end of Easy Rider, stretches out forever as the camera ever-so-slowly pans down the highway.

It’s the sort of excess you’d expect from someone who allowed Chicago to make three of its first four records double albums.

Jerzy Kosinski’s Cockpit

Once upon a time American fiction writers were celebrities.

Throughout the 1970s, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and Truman Capote turned up regularly on late-night television, and you could count on each to be outspoken and opinionated, and to meet America’s vision of a public intellectual.

Then there was Jerzy Kosinski. Charming and witty, with his Polish accent and full head of hair, he wasn’t gruff like Mailer, sniffingly condescending like Vidal or weird as Capote. Kosinski made 14 appearances between 1971 and 1980 on The Tonight Show, making him recognizable enough that when Bantam Books reprinted several of his novels in the early 1980s, his portrait was prominent on each front cover.

Born in Poland in 1933, Kosinski and his family survived the Holocaust thanks to local villagers who aided Polish Jews. After the war, his father aligned with Poland’s newfound Communist regime and Kosinski, forging official documentation, migrated to the U.S.

Nearly all his books were best sellers; he’s best known for Being There (1971) and The Painted Bird (1965), novels that won him accolades, literary awards and were later adapted as films.

His book Cockpit, published 50 years ago in 1975, although superficially about a former operative in a security agency called "the Service," isn’t a spy novel. Novel may not be the right word to describe it either. Like his Steps (1968), the book is constructed of random vignettes written in the first person. Cockpit’s protagonist (a cold and clinical word, but this shoe fits) is a Class A sociopath, ticking every box: a lack of conscience; patterns of antisocial behaviors and attitudes; controlling with threats or aggression; manipulating others using intelligence, charm or charisma.

Most of the pieces in Cockpit revolve around violence or sex, sometimes both; the sexual content is often reminiscent of those “erotic” ghost-written letters used to run in Penthouse Forum. Sometimes it’s English-as-a-second-language awkward (“I induced her orgasm”).

It’s a claustrophobic read not helped by the lack of chapters, points where you can catch your breath. The copy just flows on and after a while, the cumulative examples of animal cruelty, mimicking bureaucrats to frighten people, stealing mail, scaring children, retracting one’s penis to make women believe it was amputated, and just the overall creepiness is wearying. At one point the narrator, speaking of the hours spent secretly photographing, developing and enlarging photos of his sexual activities, says, “I am overcome by its pointlessness.”

Understood.

Since most of the narrator’s antics – secret surveillance, trolling, photographing (not even filming) sex – seem almost mainstream these days, Cockpit is creepy, but almost quaint.

Plagued by allegation of plagiarism and deteriorating health, Kosinski died by suicide in 1991, ingesting lethal amounts of drugs and alcohol, then sealing the deal with a plastic bag around his head. 

Unless there’s some sort of Kosinski revival, like a biopic -- and he's probably worthy of such treatment -- I'm not sure if anybody is still reading him. As with many other celebrity authors, the guys who dominated The New York Times best-seller lists for decades, he seems to have dropped out of public consciousness.

Turn on, tune in, turn your eyes around 

With the sun having set over the Summer of Love several months before, a few rays of psychedelic sunshine were still beaming down on the Top 40 charts in January 1968.

Driven by its Hammond organ and fuzz guitar -- and the cowbell, the Strawberry Alarm Clock’s Incense and Peppermints was slipping down the charts after holding the number one spot for one week in November. It was easy to question the band’s Haight-Ashbury Street creds, always neatly attired for television in kaftans, paisley pants and beads as if they had a key to the costume closet of a theatrical company, plus their contributions to the soundtrack of Dick Clark’s hippie exploit flick Psych-Out. Nonetheless, still groovy after all these years.

Strawberry Alarm Clock

According to Eric Burdon, what broke up the Animals was that he got turned on to acid and pot, while the rest of the band preferred Guinness. The reinvented Burdon found a new band of like-minded musicians and together they wrote Monterey, which may help explain the obvious lyrics and production.

Referring to their fellow musicians who played the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967 as "young gods" and "religion was being born" was pure hippie drivel, calling Brian Jones “his majesty Prince Jones” is just embarrassing. Hey Eric, you may have forgotten that you and Jones are peers.

The clumsiness continues by namechecking musicians followed by their corresponding instrument: Ravi Shankar by a sitar, The Who with power chords, Hugh Masekela by a trumpet. I will admit to really digging this record when I first heard it as age 13. Monterey went to #15 on the Billboard Hot 100.

The experimentation of Sgt. Pepper (and Revolver) likely gave producer James Guercio permission to drop a snippet of Avant-garde music into the middle of the pop ballad Susan by the innocuous Buckinghams (without the band's knowledge). The sample (Central Park in the Dark written for chamber orchestra by Charles Ives in 1906) made Susan the scariest thing on Top 40 radio, monster movie music crashing out of nowhere, a thunderstorm in the middle of a sunny afternoon. Most radio stations played the edited version without the noise. It peaked on the charts at #11.

Unassuming and pretty aren’t words very often used to describe Rolling Stones songs, yet She’s A Rainbow is both (which may explain why it only got as far as #25). The lyrics are pure acid trip (“She shoots colors all around, like a sunset going down”), although the strings (arranged by future Led Zeppelin John Paul Jones) can border on what used to be known as elevator music.

By the end of the month, Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In) by the First Edition was beginning to move up the charts, as good a satire of psych music as there ever was (although I always doubted whether the band was in on the joke), signaling an end to Top 40’s brief flirtation with psychedelia.

The Ghost Who Walks

The Phantom always promised more than it delivered.

Created by Lee Falk, the character began as a newspaper comic strip in 1936. The Phantom was a true pulp hero, more Doc Savage than Superman, relying on his strength, smarts and two holstered handguns (and of course, he was an expert marksman) to battle evil.

Working out of a fictional country in Africa, the Phantom checked off all the boxes: cool purple costume, terrific origin story (phantoming is the family business, handed down from generation to generation since 1560 and leading to the locals thinking the Phantom immortal, calling him The Ghost Who Walks), his Skull Cave headquarters, a pet wolf named Devil and a skull ring that left a long-lasting mark on the faces of bad guys.

As newspaper comic strips began to lose some of their stronghold on popular culture storytelling in the 1960s, the Phantom moved to comic books. Gold Key owned the Phantom franchise from 1963 to 1966 and that’s where the expectation versus execution argument begins. The Gold Key issues of the Phantom sported dynamic covers painted by George Wilson, good enough that Gold Key reprinted them on the back covers minus the title and cover blurbs. But inside, the stories were never very exciting, the artwork stiff.

A typical Gold Key Phantom cover

The license was transferred over the decades to other comic book publishers with mostly negligible results. A Phantom movie was released in 1996 which I seemed to remember enjoying at the time, but I can’t recall any details.  

At a used bookstore I recently came across two Phantom novels published by Avon Books. The painted covers by the same George Wilson who did the Gold Key comics covers lured me in just as they did in 1965. Avon published 15 Phantom books from 1972 to 1975, adapted mostly from Lee Falk’s comic strip, then ghosted by sci-fi author Ron Goulart, writing as Frank S. Shawn. That’s four books a year, a difficult pace similar to the production of the old pulp novels.

As with the comic books, the novels left me feeling that this was a great missed opportunity. They have an entertaining, if shlocky pulp feel to them and seemed to have been written quickly. In The Swamp Rats (1974), the Phantom is almost a secondary character in his own book; sometimes several chapters tick by without any involvement from him, at least until the end when his heroics are needed to end things and bring the villains to justice.

The Hydra Monster (1973) isn’t a monster at all, but a crime organization similar to Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD’s nemesis Hydra, created many years earlier (including a reference to cutting off one limb and two replacing it, part of the Marvel Hydra creed). As additional evidence that these books were written very quickly, Devil the wolf plays a significant role through the first half of the book before disappearing completely.

Going into these books with low expectations feels right. They’re quick reads and if you aren’t paying too much attention, enjoyable in their own ways.