Some of you may know that from time to time I like to review insect-themed horror movies on this blog. (For my previous reviews, you can search “Reel Bugs.”) Not only are these movies a guilty pleasure of mine, but they’re also a good way to help understand the relationship humans have with insects, which is a theme of my upcoming book. Today’s film: Empire of the Ants (1977).
Joan Collins plays a sleazy real estate agent who takes a group of investors on a tour of some bogus property she says she’s going to develop, in what appears to be the Florida Keys. But thanks to nearby dumping of radioactive waste, the local ants have mutated into rampaging, oversized, keening monsters who begin picnicking on the group one by one. We see shrieking people get pincered to death by eight-foot-long rubber ants, but the special effects are so bogus, it isn’t very scary.
The pacing is plodding—it takes over 28 minutes to get to the ants. The special effects are cheesy—mostly shots of actual ants, blurrily enlarged. And the dialogue is just plain painful. At one point Joan Collins says, “I wish I hadn’t seen Charlie die like that!” And later–“Giant ants?” says the local sheriff. “That’s hard to believe.”
The plot does have a semi-interesting twist in the last twenty minutes, when the five survivors of the group stagger into a town, believing they’re safe at last, only to find that the ants have taken over the local sugar refinery, and that the queen ant has converted the locals into slaves by dousing them with pheromones.
Spoiler alert: It ends the way so many of these insect movies seem to end: by blowing up the bugs. There’s a big zoom in to a tanker truck’s “FLAMMABLE” sign, and then one of the main characters manages to use it to blow up the ants—or does he???
Joan Collins doesn’t seem to be having much fun. She has to run around in gaucho pants and a polyester blouse, gets dunked into the bayou, soaked by fake rain, and dipped in green slime, and she ultimately dies at the mandibles of the ant queen.
Robert Lansing, who plays a salty tour-boat captain
What most annoyed me was how incapable of running away the women in the movie seem to be. The good-guy men have to clutch them tightly around the shoulders as they run away from the ants, as though they’re running a three-legged race, and the women keep shrieking and looking over their shoulders and stumbling over stuff.
There is one guy who chooses to run away without stopping to help a woman. So in accordance with B-movie protocol, he deserves to die, and ends up getting eaten by the ants. You could see that one coming a mile away. He wears a puka-shell necklace.