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.