Empire of the Ants (1977) | 31 Days of Horror: Oct 21

by Jovial Jay

Playing now in a double-feature with Kingdom of the Uncles!

Empire of the Ants is a mostly ludicrous film about the dangers of giant ants living in the wilds of a Florida jungle. It assembles an interesting cast of characters with enough humans to get killed off by the ants to make it at least an enjoyable B-movie romp.

Before Viewing

The trailer invokes the name of the most famous sci-fi author of all time, H.G. Wells as it shows ants snacking on tasty radioactive waste. Of course, the ants become giant creatures that attack the humans, sometimes on a boat, and sometimes on a river. The trailer then makes its most shocking revelation–that the ants are brainwashing the humans in some fashion. The controlled humans attempt to get more humans under control in this new Empire of the Ants!

Presented below is the trailer for the film.


Spoiler Warning - Halloween

Empire of the Ants

Empire of the Ants title card.

After Viewing

After a brief nature documentary showing how ants work together, herd aphids, and use pheromones to communicate, a boat is shown dumping 55-gallon drums of radioactive waste into the ocean. A canister washes up on a beach by a pier where it begins leaking silvery liquid on some ants by the shore. Elsewhere, a dozen people gather at a Florida marina to take a cruise hosted by Marilyn Fryser (Joan Collins) where she will attempt to sell them on some property at her Dreamland Shores resort. She belligerently reminds Dan (Robert Lansing), the captain of the boat, who’s in charge, and harasses her assistant Charlie (Edward Power).

The group of couples and solo individuals disembark on a pier near the location of the unnoticed leaky radioactive drum. They drink cheap booze and eat snacks while waiting to take a tour of the housing complex. Larry (Robert Pine), a married man whose wife Christine (Brooke Palance) is with him, sneaks off with Coreen (Pamela Shoop) and starts groping her before she knees him in the groin, halting his advances. Margaret (Jacqueline Scott), a middle-aged woman who was just laid off from her job of many years, chats with Dan, also a late-forty-something, about the purported value of the property.

During the tour of the property (where nothing has been built yet), Thomas and Mary Lawson (Jack Kosslyn & Ilse Earl) wander off to look at the shoddy construction and get attacked by a giant ant. The tour group sees a dead worker on the side of the road and hustles back to the boat where ants attack and kill first mate Tim (Mike Armstrong). Dan attempts to save the boat but he spills fuel in a fight with a giant ant and the boat burns. Dan swims back to shore. He and the survivors stay warm by building a fire overnight, but it is extinguished the next morning by a heavy thunderstorm. Charlie remembers that the company has a small boat on a river two miles north. They all set off.

Empire of the Ants

Marilyn gathers a bunch of prospective buyers on a cruise to show off her amazing properties for sale.

Marilyn decides she wants to stay at Dreamland Shores waiting for a rescue, but when she sees giant ants in the beach house, she follows everyone else. An older couple, the Thompsons (Irene Tedrow & Harry Holcombe), can’t keep up and hide in a shack. They wait out the rainstorm but emerge into a colony of giant ants. During the trip through the jungle, Christine trips, falling prey to the ants, and Charlie is grabbed and eaten when he helps Marilyn get unstuck from a branch. At the boat on a river, only six people remain: Dan, Larry, Joe (John David Carson)–a recently divorced younger man, Marilyn, Coreen, and Margaret.

They paddle down the river turning up a tributary when Larry is attacked and killed by a giant ant as they navigate past a log. The boat capsizes and the survivors begin to walk, eventually finding a small farmhouse. The woman, Phoebe (Florance McGee) whispers something to Coreen before calling Sheriff Kincade (Albert Salmi) to pick them up. He takes them into town where they get a room at a motel run by Mayor Parker (Norman Franklin). Joe tries to call a friend at the State Capitol, but no long-distance lines are working, which is weird, since the Mayor was on the phone with another town, requesting more shipments of sugar. Coreen reveals that the old woman told her to stay away from the sugar refinery. The group decides something is going on and they steal a car to head out of town.

Their route is blocked by the sheriff and Marilyn, Margaret, and Dan are captured outside the sugar refinery. Joe and Coreen run into the fields but are also soon captured. The sheriff takes them inside the refinery where a Queen Ant is re-indoctrinating citizens with a pheromone spray. The ants are controlling the humans to do their bidding and these five are next. Dan lights a flare he found in the car and burns the Queen, which manages to kill Marilyn in its death throes. The humans are freed from the chemical spell and escape. Joe opens a port on a gas tanker and crashes it into the refinery where it explodes, killing the ants. He manages to make it to a small pier where Dan, Margaret, and Coreen find a small motorboat. The two couples escape into the waterways of Florida, escaping the Empire of the Ants.

Now, if we’re really lucky, we may get some glimpses of some of the fascinating wildlife that’s in this area.” – Marilyn

 

Empire of the Ants

Skipper Dan realizes he’s about to lose his cabin cruiser to a horde of giant ants.

Empire of the Ants was the third and final film released by American International Pictures in their trilogy of HG Wells adaptations. The other two films were The Food of the Gods (1976, also directed by Bert I. Gordon) and The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977). Calling this film an adaptation is generous, however. The original story was published in 1905 and recounts a Brazilian boat heading into the Amazon to stop a “plague of ants” that is taking over a town. Not giant ants, just millions of ants that mutilate and poison inhabitants. In a kind of Heart of Darkness moment, the boat discovers the town already decimated and it returns back home with no real course of how to solve the problem. Directed by Bert I. Gordon, who died in 2023 at the age of 100, Empire of the Ants utilized the concept of Wells’ story, as he had with The Food of the Gods. His filmic oeuvre was creating movies with oversized beasts, with this being his final “large animal” project. Not all featured giant insects, as with The Amazing Colossal Man and its sequel, War of the Colossal Beast. He was also known for Attack of the Puppet People and Village of the Giants which have humans growing or shrinking to interact with the world around them. Gordon also supervised the visual effects of most of his films which utilized normal-sized animals on a miniature set–as seen with the ants at the sugar refinery. Sequences had varying success but often looked like an out-of-focus macro shot of a live insect with the actors pantomiming an attack.

Unlike some of the other large animal movies from the era which have the creatures invading a town or threatening one specific family, Empire of the Ants takes its cue from the popularity of disaster films from the 70s, like The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure. The first third to half of the film is mostly setup of the character relationships which feels very similar to those disaster epics. There are several couples, including an elderly couple that doesn’t make it. There’s tension between the boss (Marilyn) and her employees (Dan and Charlie) as she continues to push everyone forward while things get worse. She’s also overly confident of her crappy swamp-land lots, but her fate is not the same downfall as the architect in The Towering Inferno or the captain in The Poseidon Adventure. And of course, there’s the interpersonal conflict and relations between characters. Larry’s blatant cheating on his wife. Coreen rebuffs Larry’s advances, while she ends up coming on to Joe. Margaret is flirting with Dan, who initially seems like he could care less. These character moments do make you root for some of the people, or perhaps the ants, throughout the film.

The film also takes a twist from the formulaic plot by having the characters get rescued about two-thirds of the way into the story. Horror films are often unrelenting, running their heroes to the final frames of the film where they either succeed and kill the monster or fail and die. Empire of the Ants puts the larger group through its trial, whittling the numbers down to five members who get rescued by the sheriff. Well, that was easy! They get returned to civilization and everyone can breathe a sigh of relief. Except, things don’t seem right. There’s an Invasion of the Body Snatchers vibe in the town. The Sheriff, The Mayor, and the girl at the car rental place all seem to be blocking the characters from actually leaving town. Side note: this is the second giant animal film this week with a corrupt Mayor–even if he is under the control of the ants’ pheromones. The final act of the film changes pace and ups the stakes showing how the ants have taken over the town and its sugar refinery using pheromones to control the populace. I knew that the opening narration was important! Yet, is that really how it would work? It’s contrived, and not that scary since it seems like there will be a way for them to escape. By this point, audiences are probably rooting more for Joan Collins’ character to get killed more than anything.

Empire of the Ants

Joe, Coreen, Dan, Margaret, and Marilyn catch their breath after a close encounter with a giant ant in the swamps of Florida.

As with other films dealing with natural horror, audiences’ fright levels will vary with how much they are scared by any particular beast. Jaws is an effective horror film due to the aggression of the shark, but also its ability to come out of nowhere to attack. Alligator, last night’s film, has a similar element of surprise since the creature initially appeared in the sewers. Empire of the Ants attempts to hide the ants in the wooded jungle, springing them on the unsuspecting people as a surprise. But let’s be honest, the ants provide a specific sound effect that the characters hear every time they come near. The growth and foliage are not enough to hide a giant ant from characters running for their lives. Would the Thompsons really be unaware that there were a dozen large ants outside the little wooden shack they were hiding in? The horror becomes laughable–unless ants are something that really creep you out. In this case, this might provide some chills.

The environmental message in Empire of the Ants is more extreme than Alligator and is on par with the majority of other films of giant animals. The cause of the mutations, and all wrongdoings, is clearly man. Within the opening moments of the film, radiation-suited men jettison at least a dozen drums labeled Radioactive Waste into the ocean. That right there is a plot element for at least another sequel with giant sea life. It’s a little comic-booky, but not worse than the toxic spills of Zombeavers (mutant beavers), Prophecy (mutant bear), or C.H.U.D. (mutant people). It’s always interesting how quickly the filmmakers indicate that these mutations happen. It seems like only a matter of days between the spill and the prospective land buyers arriving at the location. At least the mutations of Mimic take place over a suitable timeline of years, rather than days.

As mentioned above, the visual effects of the film are lacking. Split-screen imagery places real ants in miniature sets next to humans in the real jungles of Florida. But the combination just looks bad, highlighting the thick black borders of the mattes used to combine the images. For closeup shots of the actors being attacked by the mutated ants, life-size puppets were created. It’s hard to tell how well they actually worked, due to the shaky camera movement used every time someone was attacked. Audiences only get a sense of the creatures’ attack, and nothing up-close or memorable. The most effective element of the ant scenes is the “ant-vision,” which utilizes a special lens on the camera providing dozens of round images of the scene. While campy, Empire of the Ants provides just enough deviation from the giant animal formula to make for an enjoyable film. This would be an even better film to see at a remote drive-in theater.

Empire of the Ants

Joe and Coreen are corralled by the sheriff’s deputies under the influence of a queen ant’s pheromones.

Assorted Musings

  • Joan Collins, best known for her role as Alexis Carrington in the TV show Dynasty, had a number of early horror credits to her name. These include the original 1972 Tales From The Crypt and Tales That Witness Madness–both anthology films, plus a small part in the eighth season of American Horror Story.
  • Robert Lansing, a character actor from dozens of television shows, appeared in several horror anthology shows including The Twilight Zone. He also starred in several other low-budget horror films from the 70s and 80s including Scalpel, Island Claws (about giant sand crabs), and The Nest (about giant roaches). Genre fans may also know him as Gary Seven from the Star Trek episode “Assignment: Earth.”
  • Pamela Shoop will appear later in the month in the slasher sequel Halloween II.
  • Robert Pine was better known to viewers of the late 70s as Sergeant Joseph Getraer on the TV series CHiPs. He is also the father of actor Chris Pine.

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