Empire of the Ants

Starring:Joan Collins, Robert Lansing, John David Carson, Albert Salmi, Jacqueline Scott, Pamela Susan Shoop, Robert Pine, Edward Power, Brooke Palance, Tom Fadden, Irene Tedrow, Harry Holcombe, Jack Kosslyn, Ilse Earl, Janie Gavin, Norman Franklin, Florance McGee, Jim Wheelus, Mike Armstrong (II), Tom Ford (VI)
Director: Bert I. Gordon
Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
Product Type: DVD

Description

EMPIRE OF THE ANTS: Original Theatrical Trailer

Customer Reviews:

70's classic.......2007-02-07

Great example of a 70's "thriller" movie. The giant fake ants are pretty good for the time it was made. It also has the obvious funny shots with real ants ( pre CGI ). It worth watching for the 1970's atmosphere....that is something they can't duplicate now days.

Two Terrible Movies/One Low Price.......2006-01-07

Really,

These movies are both horrible. "Empire of the Ants" has fake-looking giant ants attacking completely unsympathetic cardboard "characters." For those who enjoy pointless film trivia, a pre-Dynasty Joan Collins plays a trashy real-estate agent out to make a buck on unsuspecting deadbeats. Who cares? "Tentacles" has a fake-looking octopus attacking completely unsympathetic cardboard "characters." Again, who cares?

This movies are only good as "party/event movies", ie. Call a friend over, dim the lights, fire up the popcorn, and check out this shlock!

Think Big.......2005-08-22

Two fun movies of nature striking back. Bert I Gordon's Empire Of The Ants is first. When ants eat radioactive sludge dripping from a beached barrel, they don't just die like they actually would(that would make for a rather short and boring movie), they grow, bro!! They decide to attack a group of folks on a real estate tour. No one's there to buy real estate, everyone is portrayed as penny pinching tightwads along for a free tour and the chance of getting some nookie. Soon they're getting picked off by giant ants and must go upstream to survive. Then we find out what's worse than giant ants is a giant ant conspiracy. This is a fun movie.
Next up is Testicles, and you're sure to have a ball with this one. You'd have to be nuts not to. While watching this film you'll wonder how the hell John Huston and Henry Fonda were talked into starring in this film. Fonda's role is totally pointless. It's as if the producers said, "Look everyone, we can get Henry Fonda to be in our movie!" A giant octopus is killing folks and stripping them of all flesh including bone marrow. Nasty brute. Bo Hopkins is called in to get rid of the thing. The film actually tries to be a scary creature feature in the vein of Jaws, and there actually are one or two scenes that work very well. The film does look professional too. While it's not great, it's a good second half to this dvd package.

Two chilling tales of nature gone wild..........2005-05-03

Empire of the Ants (1977)

Run for the hills (or the Raid)! Bert I. Gordon, aka Mr. Big (due to his penchant for making films involving giant creatures, and also, it's his initials), brings on some serious cinematic pain with his rendition of author H.G. Wells story Empire of the Ants (1977). Gordon, certainly a man of many hats, not only wrote (adapted from an H.G. Wells story), directed and produced the film, but he also was in charge of the special effects. The film stars Joan Collins of TV's Dynasty, and Robert Lansing, whose television credits are too numerous to mention but is most familiar to me from the 1959 film 4D Man. In the beginning we get some painfully obvious foreshadowing involving stock footage, along with voice over, showing ants busy at work. We then cut to workers in HAZMAT suits on a boat, dumping clearly marked barrels of radioactive waste in the water. We see one of the barrels wash up on shore, as the ominous music plays on...Cut to preparations being made for an excursion by yacht to view swampy properties for sale, sponsored by some realty company called Dreamland Properties, or some such thing. It's here we meet Marilyn Fryer (Collins), the woman in charge. How do we know this? Because she's being a real pain in the rear, basically telling everyone she's the boss, especially Dan Stokely (Lansing), the captain of the boat, who, by the way, wears a lovely earring (yargh, I'm a pirate!) throughout the film (man, the 70's were weird). Soon the prospective suckers...er, I mean buyers show up, and what a charming lot they seem to be...adulterers, freeloaders, and just general sleezy characters all around, and they're off, leisure suits and all. They arrive at a pier, disembark from the yacht, and proceed to a tent to get liquored up (ply the rubes with free booze, and the property sells itself, I guess). Everyone then gets on a two-car tram, and tool around, while Marilyn, sitting in the front of the tram, all of about 3 or 4 feet from the clients, starts yelling into a megaphone in case anyone is hard of hearing (if they weren't, they are now). Earlier we saw the drum of radioactive waste wash up on the beach, and we also saw it beginning to leak silver paint, er...I mean radioactive waste, and we also saw ants wallowing around in the oozing material. That can't be good...I mean, if 1950's (and Bert I. Gordon) taught us anything, it's that radioactive materials generally have the effect of `embiggening' things. Well, sure enough, the ants exposed to the stuff become humongoid, and start picking off hapless members of this little outing. All I could think was this wasn't going to be good for the realty business, what with the radioactive waste and giants ants. Well, the remaining members of the party discover, to their horror, what ate up their former companions, and soon the nightmare ensues...

In terms of the special effects, the whole rear-projection enlargement technique was fairly well dated by the late 70's, but still managed to work well here at some points, but the noticeable difference in that technique and the use of prop ants certainly delineated the differences in the sizes of the ants. One method use would make them appear as big as a bus, while another would make them seem a large as a man. The actors all seem pretty bored and given they spent a fair amount of time futzing around in a swamp, I am sure they probably figured at some point they weren't getting paid nearly enough. The script, well, is pretty hideous. Inane remarks, pointless declarations, and lame characterizations only serve to make so very obvious who was going to be ant fodder. And not a likeable character in the bunch ensured the audience rooted for the ants, as this particular society really didn't seem worth saving. I did enjoy the sort of twist element near the end, even though it was telegraphed so obviously at the beginning of the film, giving this schlockery a bit of originality and a nice little spin within the genre. I have to say, I did get annoyed early on with some of the sound effects. The ants had two basic effects working, one being a persistent chirping which would indicate their presence nearby, and a screaming sound when they were attacking or being attacked. This second one was definitely the more annoying of the two, as it was akin to having a woman scream in your ear every ten seconds.

Tentacles (1977)

Also known as Tentacoli, Tentacles (1977) is definitely the worse of the two films on this MGM Midnite Movie creature double feature. Produced and directed by Ovidio G. Assonitis (Piranha Part Two: The Spawning), the film features a number of well-known actors including John Huston (Candy), Shelley Winters (Lolita), Bo Hopkins (The Day of the Locust), Claude `Sheriff Lobo' Akins (Battle for the Planet of the Apes), and Henry Fonda (On Golden Pond). The movie takes place in a small California beachfront town and begins with the disappearance of a couple of people due to something lurking in the waters (if you guess octopus based on the title, give yourself a cookie). Sheriff Robards (Akins) and local curmudgeon and reporter Ned Turner (Houston) are baffled by what is discovered when the bodies are found and examined, as the flesh has been stripped from the corpses, and the marrow sucked from the bones (okay, now I'm thinking maybe it wasn't a giant octopus, but a group of lawyers). There's speculation that Mr. Whitehead (Fonda), President of Trojan Tunnels (insert condom jokes here), and his company's local tunnel project maybe involved, but the evidence is thin. Soon it's decided to bring in a marine expert *cough cough* named Will Gleason (Hopkins), and he ultimately determines what this little beach front community has on their hands is a giant octopus, which then leads to a few more people getting all ate up along with a series of miniature boats destroyed. The situation becomes personal for Gleason, who sets out to destroy the carnivorous marine mollusk with the help of some recently released killer whales (insert free Willy jokes here).

I know the impressive cast list for this film has probably blown you away, but don't get too excited. Fonda appears in three scenes for a total of about five minutes. As far as the rest, well they can hardly save this film, despite their efforts...and not one of them got killed by the `giant' octopus (I was so hoping the incredibly annoying Shelley Winters' character might have been on the menu, but alas, no such luck). Overall the film is a series of loosely connected scenes eventually leading up to a final confrontation that's hardly worth waiting around for...the film starts off really strong with the disappearance of the people, but then gets bogged down as a bunch of rather meaningless characters are trotted around on the screen for the next hour and a half (the film runs about 1 hr 42 min which is about 20 minutes too long). I think Hopkins' character is supposed to be the hero, sort of a conglomeration of the three main characters from the film Jaws (1975) in Brody, Quint, and Hooper, but comes off as a complete lame duck character (most of the main characters that were introduced early on in the film are never seen again after about three quarters of the way in). Another thing I found really annoying was there was never any really clear shot of the octopus, giving us a clear perspective of its actual size, which seemed to vary greatly throughout the film. There was an attempt to create a sense that a giant killer octopus is much more dangerous than a killer shark (many of the films that followed Jaws tried to `one-up' themselves on that film), but it never really flies. At least this attempt wasn't as heavy-handed or obvious as was the case in Orca (1977). All in all the acting was okay with the direction and story sinking this film more than else. The music was odd, if not interesting (also repetitive)...

The anamorphic widescreen pictures for Empire of the Ants (1.85:1) and Tentacles (2.35:1) look very clear and clean, and the audio for both come through well. The only extra feature available for each film is a theatrical trailer. Now that Sony has bought up the MGM catalog, the fate of Midnite Movies seems uncertain. I hope they continue on releasing these lesser known films in this economical `twofer' format, as I will keep buying them.

Cookieman108

Movies with similar food preferences.......2005-03-08

In both movies people seem to be the prefer snacks.
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Empire of the Ants:

A must for your Joan Collins collection

Yes, this movie is a "B" or less. The problem comes in taste or preference. I would have given this movie a "five star" rating; however no one would ever take my reviews serious again...
The Photography is poor. This is a candidate for MST3000. I can not quite say that it is Joan Collins "Biography - Joan Collins" ASIN: B000006QJR at her best. And you know how some movies are so bad that it is good? Well this is not one of those movies.
On the other hand there is a lot of stay in the car scenes and action in running away from ants. You can guess who the bad Guy(s) are. But then you have to figure out why and what their angle is. It leaves you with the feeling that all ants eat sugar and slow people. But only the queen ant eats beans and doesn't use gas-x.
Watch at your own risk.
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Tentacles:

Hey buddy watches those Tentacoli

There is no wrath like an octopus scorned. Take a lot of actors past their prime, add an octopus past its prime, toss in some bathing beauties worth eating, and a few brats on small sailboats for desert and you have a movie.
You already know the story of the ruthless developer that does not mind a little sea food (for Mr. Tentacles) if it does not get in the way of the project. Self conscious "do-goober" that thinks eating people is not nice and a buddy going down for revenge.
This leave us with the question does the innocent cephalopod get dispatched or does he live for a sequel?

Average customer rating:

Serve up one plate of cheesiness!! This movie is the best!
Laughably bad
Empire of the Brainless
Not your typical scary horror film.
Joan Collins is the real queen of the mound

Empire of the Ants
Starring: Joan Collins , Robert Lansing , John David Carson , Albert Salmi , and Jacqueline Scott
Director: Bert I. Gordon
Manufacturer: MGM (Video & DVD)
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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ASIN: B00005O070
Release Date: 2001-11-20

Amazon.com

Joan Collins stars in this hilarious giant bug epic. Producer-director Bert I. Gordon, the genius behind such stuff-grows-really-big films as The Amazing Colossal Man and Village of the Giants, brings us a cautionary tale of what can happen when pollution, real-estate scams, and social insects mix. Collins, an absolute portrait of the valiant trouper who keeps plugging away no matter how bad the script gets, stars as shady land developer Marilyn Fryer. Marilyn is by only a small margin the sleaziest of a band of characters so repellent it's hard not to root for the ants (who, by the way, grow really big). A ludicrous plot and jaw-droppingly bad dialogue make Empire of the Ants ideal for late-night viewing. Watch it with your most vicious circle of friends. DVD version includes the original trailer and French and Spanish subtitles. -Ali Davis

Customer Reviews:

Serve up one plate of cheesiness!! This movie is the best!.......2007-05-28

Quick plot synopsis of "Empire of the Ants!"....
A bunch of cheapskates go with Joan Collins on a real estate, timeshare sort of all-expense-paid cruise to a remote island. Of course, no one on the trip actually intends to buy the real estate. They just want free booze and to sneak a peak at Joan Collins' caboose!
They go to the island and, little do they know that toxic waste recently fell of a government barge into the water coming ashore. This toxic waste mutates some ants. Do ants usually travel so far into the sand toward the coming tide of water? Anyway....they get mutated, turn into monster ants, and kill of the cheapskates one by one.

Before reading on, you must ask yourself some questions...
Do you enjoy watching elderly people get devoured by ants?
Do you like watching a has-been British snob of an actress boss people around?
Do you like watching Jacqueline Scott, a really corney actress, hit on Robert Lansing, who doesn't have the slightest interest in her, understandably!?
Do you mind seeing Pamela Shoop? Of course not, that's a stupid question. What a 70's hottie!
Do you think you can stand watching enormous, fake-looking props made of cardboard and painted plastic that are supposed to be ant mandables and arms?
How about an entire town that has been brainwashed by the ants into becoming their slaves through pheremone chemical suggestion?

If the answer is "yes," you're good to go! Of course, there's a dude named Larry who is a real WEASLE throughout the movie. Robert Pine plays Larry. Robert Pine was the chief on "Chips," the tv cop show in the 70's. Well, Larry is such a chicken to help his wife that he lets the ants eat her rather than try and save her life. Great guy! Jeez.

Check out this movie; it's fun....

Laughably bad.......2006-07-05

This is terrible. Thank goodness the Midnight Movies DVD release had the sense to dress up the cover with shlocky artwork that encourages you to enjoy the cheesier aspects of the film rather than the drama, because as a serious monster movie, it fails pretty solidly. Joan Collins leads the not-so-star cast in a tale of rampaging giant ants, grown huge on eating radioactive waste and overrunning a remote swampland location where Joan is leading a guided tour of prospective real-estate purchasers. The ants have grown to the size of horses and they aren't shy about attacking, so it's a fight for survival as the terrified humans try and escape the ant-filled swamp.

The cast are all pretty forgettable, and even Joan Collins does little with her (admittedly 2-dimensional) part. Playing the part of a haughty, manipulative schemer is one of her proven abilities, and she performs adequately and it is always nice to see her strutting and sniping while she's onscreen. Unfortunately her acting skills fail her when she is called upon to cower in terror in the face of giant ants, but then, none of the cast manage to pull this off realistically with the very poor special effects that have to contend with. And of course its giant ants we have paid to see, so after half an hour of very obvious character setting dialogue and strolling about, we are ready to cheer as we finally see the first giant ants attack....oh dear.

Well, it's not good. The ants are presented on screen in two ways, either in magnified footage of real ants performing on tiny sets, or giant fake prop ants bumping into the live actors for the attack close ups. The shots with real ants are sometimes blended together with shots of the actors which looks really bad on-screen, and you can see the dividing lines between the composite images almost every time. If this had been done flawlessly, the film would have looked great during these sequences because the close up ant footage is quite good, and on certain occasions the joins are not all visible (the old couple who find themselves surrounded when emerging from a small hut is quite a good example), but these good scenes are nearly always spoiled by the actors being required to stand rooted to the spot in case they unwittingly step outside of the patch of screen they are contained in, while the ants similarly rattle around in their portion of the screen, and the two sides never touch each other.

The giant fake ants are another matter entirely. Big cumbersome props of giant ant heads and a couple of the front legs are pushed and poked at the screaming actors who seem to fall to the ground and become magically covered in blood without making even the slightest effort to get out of the way. This is most glaringly apparent in the very first ant-attack, when a man urges his wife to run away, only to remain standing completely still himself, waiting to be eaten. Whats worse is that every (and I mean EVERY) scene involving the fake giant ants attacking people is filmed with a wildy flailing camera that is constantly swinging in all direction, obviously done to avoid showing the dummy giant ants too clearly and for too long. It's intensely irritating, but you can easily see why the director did it, as the model ants are pretty bad. They don't resemble the live ants very well, especially as they have big tufts of ginger hair all over them! Oh yes and they also make loud, electronic-sounding noises all the time...of course, because real ants are noted for the very loud chirruping, whirring noises they make, aren't they? And later on in the film, they also scream, which I thought had to be one of the female cast members when i first heard it, but no, it's the ants, yelling out and generally overacting more than the human cast.

There's plenty more lame plot, effects and twists to come before the end of the film, and all of it done with a really rotten script and some very daft plot devices. Right at the start of the attack, the captain of the small boat that brought the tourists decides to BLOW-UP the vessel - just because a couple of ants have jumped aboard! Surely any rightminded captain would think of a way to get them off and use the boat to escape rather than scupper it immediately...it's not even out at sea, just tethered to a small jetty. As soon as I saw this scene, my little remaining respect for the script went right down the pan, and I realised I might as well steel myself for plenty more lapses in logic to start cropping up - and they did, countless times.

This film is a dud of magnificent proportions, and to think I actually went to the theatre to watch it when it was released in the late 1970's. As a kid, I thought the giant ants were cool, but I must have missed all the awful script inconsistencies and poor acting. Some of the film is bad enough to be genuinely funny, so if you are thinking of watching it, get ready to laugh, because there's nothing remotely scary or dramatic going on here.

Empire of the Brainless.......2005-09-23

Perhaps the synopsis should be reversed. It should read, "Will the leaders of giant ant community succeed in enslaving these obnoxious human beings? Will the ants be able to eat the humans without having indigestion?"

If one were to look up the word "stupid movie" in the dictionary, you'd see the words "Empire of the Ants" right underneath it as the definition.

If you want good acting and a very suspenseful plot, watch something else!

If you want to watch the dictionary definition of "stupid", watch this!

Not your typical scary horror film........2005-03-02

Review by the students enrolled in ENT 201, Insects on Film, Clemson University, Spring 2005.

Empire of the Ants, is not your typical, scary horror film. I understand that this film was made in 1977, but even Godzilla was scarier than this movie. This movie is a balance between sci-fi and comedy. It stars Joan Collins as a self-centered real estate agent in the process of selling swampland, in the form of a soon-to-be resort, to potential buyers. Only towards the end of the movie does the director throw in a little suspicion to try and keep the viewers interested. On the other hand, I did find a little humor in the film and if compared to movies similar to, Beginning of the End, it was not that bad.

The movie begins with Marilyn, the owner of Dreamland Shores, taking a boat load of potential buyers to see her "overpriced swampland". On the island she tries to wheel and deal her customers into buying land by giving them free liquor and food. Little do these people know, Dreamland Shores is infested with gigantic, people eating ants that have been eating toxic waste that washed ashore. One by one the ants pick off some of the buyers leaving only six of them to escape the ants and reach safety in a near by town. Once they arrive in the town they begin to notice little things that seem very strange. Only about one-third of the group makes it to the town, where none of the locals seem concerned about the ants. As they try to escape they are captured again and this time they are taken to the sugar refinery only to find out that the inhabitants of the town are being hypnotized by the queen ant. Now, their only chance at surviving is by crossing a river and going to a local town. The fear that they might become slaves to a queen ant provokes Don, the boat captain, to shoot a flare at the queen allowing him and the rest of his crew to escape, except for Marilyn who was hypnotized before she could escape. Upon escaping, John, who is only along for the free food and drinks, drives a gas truck around the sugar refinery and sets fire to it which kills the ants.

The downsides to this film were that some of the scenes were used over and over again, and there was a good bit of foreshadowing in the film. Although the scenery was cheesy, the entomology facts were correct in some parts of the movie. The queen ant in the movie uses pheromones to gain power over the town's people, which is similar to how queen ants in real life gain power over other ants; I guess that the same scenes were used over and over in order to save money or to save time. This might help out while shooting the film but in the end it makes for a poorly produced movie. The foreshadowing in the film makes it hard to get interested at first. Once the six characters make it safely to the town, the foreshadowing stops and a bit of suspicion are thrown in and this is where the film gets a little interesting.

Looking at the scientific side of the film also helps to redeem this film's rating. The ants in the movie portrayed correctly. There are around 20,000 species of ants; 570 species exist just in the U.S. In each species, there are three types of ants: the queen, the sterile females, and the males. Ants have inhabited Planet Earth for 100 million years. They were shown as being everywhere, in every direction that you turn, and when shown up close you could tell that they have hair. In the movie, the queen ant controls the town and all the people in the town. On the scientific side of ants there are three types of ants: the queen, males, and workers. Of these three types of ants the queen controls the males and the workers.

Aside from labeling this film a horror and by not overlooking the downsides makes it easier to say that this movie is not a great film. . The actors/actresses did a good job of playing the roles of the scared visitors and the ant controlled town's people. The music selection was great for portraying the mood, feelings, and emotions throughout the movie. By looking at the end of the movie and the scientific side of the film you can see that there was not much time or energy put into making this movie. This movie was all together informative and somewhat entertaining for a 1977 flick!

Joan Collins is the real queen of the mound.......2004-10-09

Hold onto your wits and hold on for a wild ride as Joan Collins leads the way on this South Florida adventure. Joan is in the real-estate business, actually she's a con artist trying to sell worthless swampland to anyone that will listen. The would-be customers gather on the boat for a free ride and refreshments. Once at the location, the high pressure sales pitch begins. Little do they know that some ants have been swimming in radioactive waste and are now the size of Cadillacs.

Joan looks lovely running through the woods and going down the river in a rowboat. She's very sexy when she sweats profusely. Not everyone in her party is as fortunate as her though. An elderly couple who can't keep up bite the dust. Also a husband who decides it's cheaper to sacrifice a wife than pay for a divorce watches his wife get devoured. No real loss for him, he already had his eyes on another chick in the little band.

Well the ending is pretty weird. Seems the whole town is under the control of the ants thanks to some kind of Brain washing gas that the people get a whiff of when placed in a glass box with the Queen Ant. Alas poor Joan doesn't make it out of the box. The ant decides she'd rather make a good meal.

I love Joan Collins and got this movie only because of her. She once said this was the most grueling part she ever played. If you like Joan too, I highly suggest this little gem of a film.

Average customer rating:

Serve up one plate of cheesiness!! This movie is the best!
Laughably bad
Empire of the Brainless
Not your typical scary horror film.
Joan Collins is the real queen of the mound

Empire of the Ants
Starring: Joan Collins , Robert Lansing , John David Carson , Albert Salmi , and Jacqueline Scott
Director: Bert I. Gordon
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

General | Science Fiction & Fantasy | Genres | DVD | Video