Space 1979 Wells-A-Thon 2: The one by Mr. BIG

 

Title: Empire of the Ants

What Year?: 1977

Classification: Knockoff/ Anachronistic Outlier

Rating: For Crying Out Loud!!! (2/5)

 

With this review, I’m continuing my lineup of movies based on the work of H.G. Wells. This time around, I have a movie that took more liberties than usual with Wells’ source material, meaning that it’s quite debatable if it’s based on Wells at all (see The Shape of Things to Come). As a bonus, it gave me my first look at a notorious filmmaker whose work I’m sure most people would have expected me to be an expert on. What I found almost as interesting was that this very threadbare effort still had an impact on how Wells’ work was presented to the public. Here is Empire of the Ants, as presented by Bert I. Gordon.

Our story begins with a pseudo-documentary sequence quite correctly portraying the abilities and total superiority of ants, effective enough to feel like we’re watching Phase IV. Any comparison is quickly dashed as we are introduced to a crooked real estate developer Marilyn, her boyfriend and a rogues’ gallery of characters about to go on a river cruise to view their alleged property. It’s quickly made clear that anyone who invests is going to be ripped off. Unfortunately, it also turns out that the land has been overrun by a colony of giant ants. The group must forge their way through the swamp, with the ants never far behind and sometimes apparently ahead. Eventually, Marilyn makes her way back to civilization, minus her boy toy and several of their marks. But the survivors aren’t safe yet, as the ants already have their own collaborators in the nearest down, under the thrall of the biggest ant of all!

Empire of the Ants was written and directed by Bert I. Gordon, also responsible for the previous year’s Food of the Gods and 1965’s Village of the Giants, based nominally on an H.G. Wells story of the same name. While these and other films earned Gordon the nickname “Mr. BIG”, he had in fact also made a number of horror and “straight” mystery/ crime movies, as well as the exploitation comedy How to Succeed With Sex.  The film was distributed by B-movie mill AIP (see Futureworld, Meteor, The People That Time Forgot, etc.), with co-founder Samuel Z. Arkoff credited as executive producer. The movie starred Joan Collins and Robert Lansing (see The Nest), four years before Collins found new fame on the soap opera Dynasty. The ants were mainly portrayed with footage of genuine live insects enlarged with rear-projection and other optical effects carried over from Gordon’s earlier films, with life-sized puppets used for a number of closeups. An anthology of the original story and eight others by Wells was published by Tempo Books as a tie-in with the movie. Oddly, a second Wells anthology titled Empire of the Ants was released by Scholastic in 1977, with very little further overlap in content. While a number of Wells works included giant insects, the ants in the story are of ordinary size.

For my personal experiences, my main reference point for this one is junior high, when I first recall reading Wells’ short fiction. I can still remember my first encounters with true classics like “The Crystal Egg”, “In The Abyss” and “The Red Room”. It will be commentary enough to say that I have no recollection at all of when or even if I read “Empire of the Ants”, which in hindsight had already been far outdone by Murray Leinster’s “Doomsday Deferred”. I definitely did learn of the works of Bert I. Gordon, especially Food of the Gods. In planning this mini-feature, I very seriously debated between that or the present movie, as I simply did not see any instructional value in actually covering them both. I made my choice because plenty has already been said about the earlier film, and because Empire of the Ants was far more obvious in drawing on earlier films like Them and Phase IV rather than Wells’ actual story. For the extra random factor, I watched the movie as a sketchy upload that kept getting interrupted by ads in Spanish, because there was no way I was paying money for this one.

With that out of the way, I have to say this one gets off to a halfway decent start. The shots of the ants and the swampscape (filmed on location in Florida) are effectively foreboding, while the  human characters are at least horrible in unique and interesting ways. There’s also the obligatory shots of nuclear waste, which are done effectively enough to make a bridge between the preposterous fears of the ‘50s and the “serious” pretensions of the ‘70s. Once the group is on the run, there’s some good old-school tension as they struggle and frequently fail to escape the ants. There’s some extra “so bad it’s good” fun in the hilariously bad decisions of the cast (conspicuously an otherwise sympathetic old couple who stop at a “shelter” about as secure as a cardboard box), which could be taken as a slasher movie parody if Halloween wasn’t still a year ahead. Things actually improve substantially in the final act, which feels like a cross between Them and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The only real flaw in the setup is that the most genuinely interesting ideas don’t turn up until it’s a bit too late for them to be fully developed.

The overarching problem is the ants themselves. I would normally be the last to complain about “bad” effects (compare Dark Star and Jaws 3); show me stop-motion, practical, optical, a goddam beach ball, I’ll say yes to all. But these effects go far beyond inept or outdated. This would have been second-rate at best when Mr. Gordon started making movies, and we have the likes of George Pal’s War of the Worlds and Harryhausen’s Beast From 20,000 Fathoms to prove it. But the obvious flaws are just aggravating factors in two much deeper problems. First, the filmmakers can never get their scale straight. In the more convincing shots, the ants look no bigger than the humans, perhaps as small as dogs. In others, especially toward the end, they are literally as tall as semi trucks. Second and worse still, they are rarely truly threatening, as a direct and foreseeable result of using “real” ants. Left literally to their own devices, the insects mostly just mind their own business, just like the complex social creatures they really are. It would be tempting to say that the film would have been better off with just the practical rigs, except it’s all too clear how those worked out.

For the “one scene”, there is truly no topping the surreal finale. After reaching town, Marilyn and most of the survivors are captured and led to the ant queen, appropriately housed in a sugar plant that looks vaguely like a pyramid. The authorities explain that the townspeople all serve the queen, but must be kept in line with regular “indoctrination”, which consists of being sprayed with a mind-controlling pheromone. The scene is impressively grim as we see the docile townspeople lined up outside the queen’s chamber. In one of the Gordon’s few shows of advisable restraint, there are glimpses of the queen herself, but never a clear look at the entire creature. Soon, Marilyn is pushed inside, and there is a closeup as she either freezes or braces herself… and then the spray comes.

In closing, I freely admit that this is easily among the worst movies I have reviewed for this or any other feature. However, I have always been very clear that when I give a movie the lowest rating, it is for reasons that go well beyond mere technical ineptitude. Compared to the cynicism of Laserblast, the laziness of Warof the Planets, or the flat noxiousness of Inseminoid, movies like this one are too harmless and a little too sincere to actively hate. If it comes to that, it just might have led at least a few young people to Wells’ actual work. In my book, that’s enough to give this one a reprieve.