Ants are interesting creatures.  On the one hand, they work hard and they can design and build a complex home in just a matter of hours.  They’re loyal to the other members of their tribe and they all happily do whatever needs to be done to keep their community healthy and moving forward.  They’re family-orientated.  They take care of their children.  They eat earth worms.  They fight other ants.  They can carry several pounds over their own weight.  They like to move in a single-file line.  These are all things that people, in general, admire.  If you had to hire someone to do some yardwork, you would want someone who had the attitude of an ant.

At the same time, ants also have no respect for privacy, they tend to get everywhere, and they bite you and leave behind those ugly red marks that take forever to go away and that can itch like heck.  I was once outside barefoot, helping someone wash his car, when I suddenly felt a really intense pain in my foot.  I looked down and saw that I had stepped straight into an ant hill.  It was not only an ant hill but it was a FIRE ANT HILL!  I grabbed a hose and I washed all of the ants off my foot but it was still one of the most painful experiences of my life.  Ants are hard-working and industrious but they’re also kind of mean and they really don’t like humans.  (Maybe they would like us more if people stopped kicking ant hills and using magnifying glasses to set them on fire.)  Ants will break into your house and then bite you when you tell them to go away.  My point is that you might like ants but ants do not like you and you better remember that!

The 1977 film, Empire of the Ants, is all about humanity’s mixed feelings towards ants.  Joan Collins plays a shady real estate agent who leads a group of potential home buyers into the bayou because she wants to trick them into buying some worthless property on a nearby island.   What Collins and her clients don’t know is that a barrel of radioactive waste was recently dumped off of a nearby boat and when the waste washed on shore, a bunch of ants got into it and it caused them to become giant ants!  The giant ants are industriously creating their own sugar-based society but they’re also attacking and brainwashing humans!

Needless to say, this is a Bert I. Gordon film.  Gordon took his “Mr. Big” nickname quite literally and, as a result, he spent almost his entire career making movies about animals and occasionally humans who were turned into giants by radiation.  Apparently, radiation can do anything!  Empire of the Ants is a typical Gordon film, in that the special effects are just bad enough to be kind of charming.  The ants are either awkwardly super-imposed into the scene or they are clearly made out of plastic.  There’s a scene where an ant grabs a man by his neck and it would be really terrifying if not for the fact that the ant’s head appears to have been made from Styrofoam.  Unfortunately, even though the special effects are bad in an amusing way, Empire of the Ants is still a pretty boring film.  Gordon devotes way too much time to the people heading out to look at Joan Collins’s beachfront property.  No one is watching a film like this for human drama.

This movie is based on a short story by H.G. Wells.  Wells, reportedly, considered it to be the worst thing he had ever written.