Empire of the Ants * (1977, Joan Collins, Robert Lansing, John David Carson, Albert Salmi, Jacqueline Scott) – Classic Movie Review 2500

Director Bert I Gordon’s hysterically awful 1977 science fiction horror movie Empire of the Ants is made in the 50s-style, but was actually made in the 70s, about holidaymakers in Florida buying into a phony housing development. But that turns out to be the least of their worries. Their main worry is going to be gigantic rampaging monster insects.

No less than Joan Collins, in a career dip just before The Stud (1978) and The Bitch (1979), stars as shady land developer Marilyn Fryser, the sleazy con artist who runs the development and tries to sell the phony real estate deals in the Florida everglades.

Marilyn and her hapless buyers don’t know that the area has been taken over by giant, mutated ants fed on leaking radioactive waste, and they are soon being attacked by them.

It is shoddy, tackily made, badly acted and boring, all encased in a low-grade production with rotten effects, but happily it is also funny if you are in the mood to scoff. Collins proves that she is game for anything, and nowadays she is able to laugh it off, while audiences can laugh at it.

Collins later said she did not like working with the ant props as they bumped and scratched the actors.

Also in the cast are Robert Lansing, John David Carson, Albert Salmi, Jacqueline Scott, Pamela Shoop, Edward Power, Brooke Palance, Tom Fadden (in his last role), Irene Tedrow and Robert Pine.

Gordon provided the screen story and screenwriter Jack Turley based his screenplay very loosely on the short story Empire of the Ants by H G Wells. It is American International Pictures’ third and last Wells film, after The Food of the Gods and The Island of Dr Moreau.

The giant ants are photographically enlarged ant footage and rear projection, ants varying in size from scene to scene and often seeming to crawl off the ground and walk upwards into thin air.

Ants were placed in a set lined with photographs of the locations where the scenes were shot, so when an ant walked onto the rear photograph it appeared to walk on the sky. Large mock-up props are used when actors need to interact with the ants.

Gordon also made Earth vs the Spider, back in 1958.

Other famous Joan Collins roles are Princess Nellifer in Land of the Pharaohs (1955) and Pearl Slaghoople in The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas (2000).

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2500

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