Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

Too much about the plot just didn't add up, the writing was bad, some of the scenes were cringey and awkward,

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

"Ants" is kind of like watching a troupe of amateur junior actors; kind of pathetic but also unintentionally funny. It's one of those "nature runs amok" movies and that means that this time, the ants are not after your picnic... they're after you! During construction near the Lakewood Hotel, a worker stumbles upon one of his co-workers inside an excavated pit frantically trying to get something off of him. While the deadly ants begin to pick off people one by one, we are introduced to our characters: sleazy real estate guy Anthony Fleming (Gerald Gordon) is traveling to the hotel with his partner Gloria (Suzanne Somers). His goal is to buy the hotel and raze it to the ground to build a casino. He also wants to sexually harass Gloria! Meanwhile, the hotel's owner, wheelchair-bound Ethel Adams (Myrna Loy) is getting worried that the increasing amount of deadly incidents will drive the property value down, but she is also undecided about the whole business deal. Her daughter Valerie (Lynda Day George) is conducting a romance between herself and a construction worker and trying to get her mom to sell the place. The construction worker in question is Mike Carr (Robert Foxworth). He's the only guy that realizes that something fishy is going on with this ant infestation at the hotel. But will he be able to convince everyone, or will they all suffer a gruesome, ant-related death? And does anyone care about anything except for the bugs killing people because this drama is DULL! "Ants" was doomed from the very beginning. An infestation of killer spiders? That's scary. An army of rats taking over a building? Sure, that could be creepy too. An army of birds threatening a human population? That one's worked in the past. Ants? No one is afraid of ants! Sure they have superior numbers and can lift many times their own weight easily, but come on! The problem is worsened by the film's made-for-TV nature and the laughable special effects. If anything was going to make this picture work, it was going to be gruesome deaths. I can see it now (and try and picture this one with me): a man trips and sees a swarm of ants advance towards him. Before he knows it, they're covering his limbs and weighing him down. It's like a pit of quicksand made of insects. Pretty soon, he begins screaming but the ants take the opportunity to enter his mouth. Now, he's a vaguely human shape, scrambling desperately towards water. As the ants devour his flesh, he slows down and the audience tries to imagine what kind of horrific damage the creatures have done to this poor fellow. As the body hits the water, the ants disperse, revealing a mutilated clump of shredded meat and bones, something to be discovered by our hero, when it is already too late to warn the people of the hotel. I'm picturing a flesh-eating disease that crawls in through the door panels and eats you alive. People will be afraid to wander anywhere NEAR an anthill! Instead, what we have here is a PG-rated film where the ants have poisonous bites which paralyze people and then kill them. Talk about boring.I've seen some really bad special effects in my days, and this ranks highly among the list of the worst of the worst. My criticism ties into the problem with the initial premise. If you want to show an army of rats, it isn't that difficult. You can get say about 20 to 50 rats and just arrange them on various pieces of furniture and show them like that. A couple of good edits and there you go, an army of rats! As a bonus, rats are pretty intelligent creatures and can be trained to do some tricks that can make them look sneaky and ferocious. What can you do with ants? You certainly can't train them to do anything so the only thing you can do is basically show them crawling around. The trouble is that to show a swarm of ants that looks sufficiently numerous to do something like completely take over a hotel you would need an innumerable amount of insects and no one could ever pull it off. The ideal situation would be to either use cutting-edge special effects or very creative photography to give the illusion of this happening. "Ants" uses rocks. You can clearly tell that in most shots where the hotel is being overwhelmed by the insects, the "trails" of ants on the walls of the hotel are not moving at all. It's because those are not ants, but black rocks glued onto surfaces. There are even shots where you can clearly tell that they took real ants and placed them on the rocky surfaces in order to get some "movement" for the camera. It just makes it that much obvious that the people in charge here bit off way more than they could chew.What makes the movie genuinely entertaining is that not only is the story ridiculous and the special effects truly awful, but the film has several nonsensical developments. People make attempts to escape with their lives that are ludicrous and clearly won't work, intelligence drains away like water in a bathtub and even with the contrived plot that forces everyone to react to the threat in a very precise manner, actions don't make any sense. You will not believe your eyes if you see this film. I'd even go so far as to say that if you are a fan of bad special effects and lousy movies, this would be a must... if the drama wasn't so gosh-darned boring. I'm giggling at the idea of someone that's unprepared seeing this flick. (On DVD, May 30, 2015)

Wow. 1977 was no picnic.A few months following Empire of the Ants, came the TV "thriller" It Happened at Lakewood Manor, or on screen: ants! (Yes, with a lowered-cased 'a' as if that makes it all the more terrifying.) Now, this may or may not have been a trend back then (Made-For-TV movies mimicking the silver screen films), but it's a downright horrid fad of the past few years and Sci-Fi (or Syfy) Channel's the biggest criminal to one of my biggest pet peeves. What started off as a "clever" way to get people to rent their bad movies in the video store when they were expecting the (enormously) bigger budgeted and (ENORMOUSLY) better quality theatrical released film is now just the movie-of-the-week months before the "real" movie hits theatres. (Side note: it actually worked, so kudos to these demon marketers.) These disgusting knock-offs are so bad, so horribly acted (starring D-List actors from decades old sitcoms,) so boring and so low budgeted it's as if it was like the kids on the block trying to recreate Harry Potter from their backyard with a phone video camera. They should be ashamed and I'm not going to even list any examples; you evil Syfy producers know your sins and will eventually pay in dividends.But, I digress. My rant really has nothing to do with ants! as this movie has only a few minor things in common with Empire of the Ants, but enough to include my rage against Syfy. Let's see: they both have killer ants, both ants attack a resort-to-be (ants! has one already, but future plans for a newer casino/resort) and both deviant ants are "getting even" with humans for toxicants in the ground. Only these ants are the right size which to me, makes it more scary than the plastic, cardboard and enlarged ants of Empire of the Ants.Wheelchair-bound owner of the Lakewood Manor resort is fending off both a greedy businessman and nasty and little black ant terrors that are simply angry for being disturbed from where a construction hole is being dug. The little ants have apparently absorbed the toxicants we humans have carelessly dumped and they're using their new superpowers to retaliate for the wake-up call. And they'll either use the conveniently placed pipe that leads into the resort's kitchen or simply march in with, I'm guessing, billions of tiny (and laughably cartoonish) warriors.Throw in a few "I Love the '70s" soap opera dramas and a climax of rescue (and in most cases unintentional hilarity) and you have this harmless "When Animals Attack" movie.And yet, I am rating this slightly hirer than I normally would. It could be, perhaps, I was the same age as one of the ant's victims when I was also personally attacked (not once, but twice) as a child, though under different circumstances, of course. Duh. This boy was digging for gold, or empty recycle glass bottles, in a garbage bin and left it covered in more than just trash. He had the luxury of running into the pool to save himself from the deadly bites of the ants. In real life, back in my home state of New York, I was probably that same age (and size) and playing on a hill in a neighbor's yard that had a tree on it. Before I knew it, I was about 40% covered from head-to-toe with ants and the neighbor had to help me. There was no body of water for me, but thankfully the neighbor helped. The other incident happened when I was a tad bit older, now in Arizona, and I had the luxury to revisit this nightmare, but like most sequels, this one contained much larger ants and improved with the color red. (By the way, for those unfamiliar with ants, that's not good news.) Coincidentally, my second encounter involved my playing in a construction ditch. I honestly don't know how I got out of that one, but I was spared somehow.So, naturally, I do have some fear of the little beasts, and this (obviously) pre-CGI movie really made my skin crawl. These were real ants, for the most part, and all over the actors. How they managed to sit still with (again, obvious) un-poisonous creatures swarming over them is beyond me.Nevertheless, besides some laugh-out-loud incidents in the final act, such as "FLYING" ants – and I'm guess that was supposed to be suspenseful when the onlookers get a 3-D version of what ails our heroes, and the dangling dame in distress, it's 100% pure "When Animals Attack" of the 1970s/1980s. You'll have everything people were dying to see: resort in peril, greedy (and mean) resort owner, beautiful (for the time) women/butch & bearded men, original victim's deaths that take the cast an hour to solve, normal everyday species affected by inconsiderate (to Mother Earth) homosapiens and a grand-scale attack/climax on screaming extras. Seriously, if you're into this sort of thing, like I'm always attracted to, you cannot do wrong here.

Ants! (1977) ** 1/2 (out of 4) A lakeside hotel is about to be sold off but before that can happen an outbreak of poison ants start killing people. This made for TV film is yet another in a long line of "when nature attacks" films but it's not too bad as long as you don't take it too serious. Suzanne Somers, Robert Foxworth, Lynda Day George, Brian Dennehy and Myrna Loy (!) all have pretty good parts in the film so the familiar cast certainly keeps things going, although all of them have seen better days. As with a lot of films like this, it's best to turn your brain off and just enjoy what's going on in front of your eyes. Once again we get a speech how this is all our fault due to the poisons we use to kill insects. Yes, we are to blame for the ant outbreak because we previously tried to kill them. While the story might be simple and rather brain dead, it does make for a mildly entertaining film. The special effects of all the ants are rather weak as in most cases it seems like something black is just sprinkled around to look like ants. There are a few scenes where we see close ups of real ants eating a butterfly but there's never anything too graphic. The biggest problem with the film is that the ants are never scary and not once did I feel threatened even though people were dying from them. AKA: It Happened at Lakewood Manor.

Even for a tired movie model as the nature vs. man cycle that prevailed so predominantly in the 1970s, ants falls miserably short of being even somewhat effective(though entertaining for reasons it was not intending). It is sooooo preposterous. Apparently these ants that are bulldozed near an inn have been eating poisonous waste for decades and have now adapted by emitting poisonous bites - hundreds of these bites being fatal. Watching actors of some notoriety clumsily fall amidst tiny black specks is painfully funny in a not-so-good-but very-bad way. So many scenes just look ludicrous: a boy trying to fall in a dumpster whilst being attacked, Suzanne Sommers crying out in horror while lounging in bed, Robert Foxworth and Lynda George breathing through pieces of wallpaper, Bernie Casey faking a gam leg, and the list goes on and on. The peril shown ranges from ants crawling from a drain to black lines of ants all over the walls. The cast for the film is not bad on paper, but none of these actors seem to believe in the material. Poor Myrna Loy has to sit in a wheelchair through this horror. I hope she found a good use for the money, for it is obvious that was the ONLY reason a woman of her pedigree would be in this nonsense. Although it is quite a bad film, it is watchable - once for me, and does have many of those seventies bad film qualities - start-studded actors embarrassing themselves, that made-for-TV feel, and the dreaded creatures of nature reeking vengeance on man. This time man must push his hand into a pile of ants to be affected. Really quite dreadful.