Empire of Ants, 1977.

I have long been of the opinion that not only does Dungeons and Dragons need an Appendix N for films, but that 1954’s Them! should be high on that list. Crawling through giant ant tunnels with a flame thrower? This is D&D as it gets. For the longest time I was content to re-watch Them! when I wanted a giant ant movie but on this day I have discovered The Empire of Ants, surely to be a worthy cousin due to the seventies having some real groovy style. We might even get a van in the picture! (spoiler alert, we don’t) For cast & crew we have Joan Collins, known as Edith Keeler in City on the Edge of Forever and later to appear on American Horror Story: Apocalypse (also she’s a Dame and is in a bunch of legitimate content but who cares about that), another Stark Trek alum, this time Gary Seven from that one crappy episode, and directed by Bert Gordon, a man known for giant monster movies – giant spiders, ants, dinosaurs, and hot beach bunnies. Speaking of vans, he was also responsible for The Mad Bomber! This was an American International Pictures film based off the works of HG Wells which came out the same year as their Island of Dr Moreau starring Basil from Austin Powers. Anyways, some sort of energy company dumps radioactive mercury in the ocean, it washes ashore, a real estate mogul wants to develop that land, giant ants attack. If you need more set up than that, you need too much.

it’s no picnic is a fucking awesome tagline

I was right about the style – we’re ten minutes in and I think everyone who’s appeared on screen has massive collars sticking out over their suits. We’ve had a single pair of giant sunglasses and unfortunately, no sideburns (yet). For females we have lots of stripes, properly coloured high-waisted blue-jeans, and those giant headband things combo’d with big hoop earrings. I was going to post a screenshot displaying these jeans but my computer monitor isn’t displaying the colour right and I don’t want to look like a jackass posting faded jeans. Watching it on a television however provides proper colouring. Maybe it’s because I permanently have my blue-light filter on. Doesn’t really matter.

these are regrettably the largest sideburns in the film

It takes 27 minutes for our first ant-attack which is a bit slow. The basic set up was explained in less than 5 minutes. That gives us 22 minutes of people just wandering around talking. We already know there’s radioactive waste, ants, and a bunch of investors fucking about, it’s time to get the ball rolling. Give us a construction employee getting killed and the company covering it up maybe – something around the 8 minute mark just to hook us in. The ant models are decent enough – big puppets probably attached to a hockey stick or broom-handle that they can just batter the actors with. This is combined with rear projection of actual ants. It looks cheesey but it’s the seventies. What do you expect? The scene of them marching across the pier to destroy the boat is great.

After that initial slow third, we pick up a bit with a chase through the bayou and some character deaths. This bayou-crawling goes on for a while and it would have been nice to see more locales for the ant-attacks but there’s enough appearances of the monsters that I’m not too concerned. They could have had some encounters at a construction site with them crawling over cement trucks and knocking over bulldozers, they could have had characters trying to hide in a site office only for it to be picked up and flung around, they could enter the ant-tunnels like Vietnam war tunnel-rats. It’s not that I’m disappointed in 30 minutes of traipsing through a bayou as giant ants wreck house, it’s that I want to see this film succeed more.

Our third act brings everyone into town where we find out that a mad sugar baron has been feeding the ants radioactive sugar and that the ant queen has brainwashed the entire town. It’s a bit of a hack-job to have such abrupt sections; almost 30 minutes each with each segment being fairly distinct. There could have been a bit more work done to blend these sections together; the town could have been introduced earlier in the film to keep it in the back of our minds, or a pool of sugary-sweet water could have been discovered. Again, these aren’t complaints, I just really want to see this movie be the best that it can be. The ending is pretty great though with ants going ballistic and lots of explosions all underscored by a soundtrack that sounds like it’s from Original Series.

We certainly have Beasts and we have a reasonable amount of Blood with no Breasts, giving this film a passing grade. As of writing this, this film holds a 5% critic rating on rotten tomatoes. Five percent? Are you kidding me? Sure it’s not the greatest film I’ve ever seen but it’s about giant ants breaking everything? How can anyone dislike this? That rating is shameful. This is clearly deserving of at least 7%. At the end of the day, I enjoyed myself – is it as good as Them!? Of course not. It would have been nice for some tunnel exploring and maybe a beach party with topless seventies babes getting attacked by ants. If those were present, this’d probably have gotten a better rating but even still I’m giving it a One Thumb Way Up Seal of Approval. We need more giant ant movies.