Whatever you else you may think about him and his films, you can’t accuse Bert I. Gordon of not taking full advantage of his initials. Mr B.I.G. carved a career from an obsession with the over-sized and the gigantic, the B.I.G.ger the better. From King Dinosaur (1955) to Village of the Giants (1965), from The Amazing Colossal Man (1958) to The Food of the Gods (1976), size mattered in the cinematic world of Bert I. Gordon 1. By the mid-18970s he was long past whatever prime he may have had but he was still up to his old tricks, this time dragging poor H.G. Wells’ name through the mud. After the risible The Food of the Gods (which took its title but precious little else from Wells’ 1904 novel The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth and which Gordon had already despoiled as the basis for Village of the Giants), Gordon turned his attention to a short story that Wells published the following year in The Strand Magazine, The Empire of the Ants.
As with The Food of the Gods, very little of Wells actually remains beyond the title. The short story relates the misadventures of Brazilian and English military officers who are sent to small village along the Amazon which has been overrun by a species of large and unusually intelligent black ants. Gordon relocates the action to the Florida everglades where a real estate scam artist (Joan Collins, shortly before her revival in fortunes when she joined the cast of the TV soap opera Dynasty (1981-1989)) is trying to offload some worthless land onto unsuspecting punters who are led to believe that all manner of fabulous developments are imminent. Unbeknownst to Collins and her motley, badly-dressed collection of 70s stereotypes (nursing all the neuroses and hang-ups that seemed de rigeur for characters in American films of the time), illegal dumping has unleashed an unexplained chemical (or possibly nuclear waste of some kind) off the nearby beaches which has caused the local ant population – though conveniently for the budget no other wildlife – to grow in size and go on the rampage. Handily there’s a sugar refinery nearby and the sweet-toothed insects enslave the local population by gassing them with their queen’s pheromones, turning them into compliant and seemingly willing slaves.
Utterly ludicrous in every respect, Empire of the Ants manages to insult both the intelligence of its audience and the good name of H.G. Wells. Chock full of dreadful characters the likes of which wouldn’t have made it past the first draft of an Irwin Allen disaster movie, all bedecked in eye-watering mid-70s fashion mishaps, there’s no-one here for the audience to root for. Everyone is either dull (Pamela Susan Shoop, John David Carson), morally bankrupt (Robert Lansing, Collins), a sex pest (Robert Pine) or just undeveloped ant fodder (the rest of the cast) and consequently barely anyone seems to even try to give a performance that rises above those seen in the blandest of television films. Collins’ American accent is particularly hopeless and seems to disappear altogether from time to time.
The film changes gears mid-way through in a vain attempt to spice things up a bit. The first half is a tedious plod around the Everglades in the company of that dreary cast as they try to set up various unconvincing relationships while all the while the ants lurk in the undergrowth watching them through a peculiar multi-circled ant-vision effect. The ants themselves finally show up as a combination of atrociously matted photographic enlargements and not-at-all convincing models that were so rough and ready that they caused some of the cast minor injuries. The effects – handled, as ever – by Gordon himself are predictably terrible and the ants never seem even remotely menacing. In the second half, the action switches to that conveniently located sugar refinery where, in the only decent moment in the film, our heroes slowly realise that the residents of the nearby town have been reduced to mindless drones by the queen’s pheromone spray. This should have been the most effective part of the film but Gordon hasn’t the wherewithal to figure out what to do with it so settles instead for a quick run-around, some ripe over-acting and a big explosion.
Gordon hadn’t advanced one iota as a film-maker since the 1950s and Empire of the Ants seems like an under-achieving throwback with effects that had barely advanced either – bear in mind that this was released the same year as Star Wars yet it looks and feels like something from two decades earlier. The characters are out of time too and there’s nothing here – apart from some conspicuous flared trousers and the odd safari suit – to suggest that this is even set in the 1970s. It tries to hitch its wagon to the “nature fights back” genre that was proving popular at the time due in no small part to the success of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), but even by the generally very low standards those films attained, this is well below par.
Noisy (everyone screeches at deafening volume, including the ants), dull, badly acted and indifferently directed Empire of the Ants proved to be the last of Gordon’s tales of gigantism and although he continued to work (his last film before his death at the grand old age of 100 would be Secrets of a Psychopath, made in 2015) he never went back to the massive insects, overgrown mutants and extra large animals since. Let’s be grateful for small mercies.
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- Attack of the Puppet People (1958) is an exception to the rule, favouring smaller than usual protagonists though inevitably the “normal” world now suddenly seems very big indeed to them. ↩
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