Boring

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

When a ship containing radioactive barrels are dumped into the ocean, trouble begins. The barrels wash ashore, and start to leak. The next day a group of tourists arrive to take a tour to see a new land development. Little do they know that this tour is nothing but a rip-off. The land developer is Marilyn Fryser(Joan Collins). She is nothing more than a snake in the grass. She is nothing but a money grabbing sleaze. The land is nothing but empty promises, filled with fake construction work. Once the group arrives they take a tour of the Island. When couple starts to look around, they are attacked by these huge ants. The group wonder where they could have wondered off to, but nobody knows. So, everyone starts to look around for them. That's when people notice these huge ants, and in order to survive they have to get off the Island. Some soon become prey, while others are able to escape. They find the local sheriff and tell him what is going on. Unknown to the others, he is aware of the problem. When the survivors get to the sugar refinery, they realize what all the secrecy is about. I am surprised by the low rating this movie got. I thought it was kind of cool, but I'm a sucker for movies about radiated bugs. This movie also stars Robert Pine( Chips) and Pamela Shoop( Halloween 2).

I'm amazed! Occasionally, movies in the outsize insects/animals brigade offer some noirish thrills, but more often than not, they concentrate on impoverished (such as "Empire of the Ants") or over-embellished special effects ("Tentacles"). Both films are available on a double feature M-G-M DVD. The former looks better in the home than it did in the cinema, and does improve when it gets into the Whip Hand climax. And it's certainly a treat for fans of Joan CollinsTentacles, however, is by far the superior film, even though Bo Hopkins and Shelley Winters out-stay their welcome, while top-billed John Huston simply disappears from the action with no explanation whatever about two-thirds of the way through. Ungaro's sluggish underwater scenes are ho-hum, but the director does try out some unusual, experimental effects in the sail-boat sequence. Some of these work well (the opening dolly shot), while others (the sudden jumps to stills) will probably irritate rather than engage most viewers.

Twenty years after over-sized mutant killer ants went on the rampage in classic 1957 creature feature Them!, Bert I. Gordon, an old hand at giant monster movies, gave the enormous insects another chance at world domination with Empire of the Ants, a schlocky big bug eco-horror apparently based on a short story by H.G. Wells.Joan Collins stars as scam artist Marilyn Fryser, who convinces a bunch of potential investors to accompany her on a boat trip to view her latest project, a coastal real estate development in the Everglades. After a few drinks, a couple of sandwiches, and a tram ride around the site (Marilyn sure knows how to spoil her guests), the group find themselves under attack from giant ants that have been exposed to leaky barrels of radioactive waste dumped in the sea by unscrupulous industrialists.Empire of the Ants is supremely silly stuff, especially when it is revealed that the insects are controlling the humans (via hypnotic ant farts!) and intend to take over the planet. Sadly it is also a surprisingly leaden affair, with uninspired direction, dire performances, and any potential tension or excitement hindered by weak special effects: most of the giant ant action is created by superimposing photographically enlarged insects over footage of the actors or through the use soft edged mattes to combine imagery, none of which is very convincing. Full-sized models of giant ants are occasionally used during close-up attack scenes, but Gordon ensures that the camera is wobbling frenetically to prevent the viewer from getting a good look at his shonky creatures.

This is not a good movie. It aspires to mediocrity and fails. The acting is generally bad, the dialogue is forgettable at best, the characters aren't very interesting, and the special effects are so bad they're the highlight of the film.Before I rant further, a synopsis is in order. Filmed in 1977, under the direction of Bert I. Gordon (creator of such classics as Satan's Princess, Earth vs the Spider, and Attack of the Puppet People, just to give you fair warning), Empire of the Ants takes place on an unnamed island off the Florida coast, where the unprincipled Marilyn Fryser (Joan Collins) is trying to sell pieces of beach to a boatload of would- be land owners. For reasons never even remotely explained, this area is the dumping ground for mysterious, sinister silver toxic waste, which has somehow transformed some of the local ants into gigantic, moderately intelligent monsters intent on either enslaving or devouring any human beings who cross their path.But they don't manage to devour all the right people.Marilyn Fryser's 'Dreamland Shores' development is the latest in a series of scams. She's hard on her employees, tricks customers into deeply inconvenient contracts, and every one of her anti-ant ideas turns out to be wrong. By the rules of most monster movies, Fryser should die a particularly gruesome and humiliating death about halfway through film. Here, she makes it all the way to the end without any apparent character development or redemption.It has to be said though, that while they're not so blatantly amoral, the other main characters are no more interesting than Fryser. There's Joe (John David Carson), the dull young guy with 'designated hero' stamped on his forehead, Coreen (Pamela Shoop), the hysterically screaming blonde, Dan (Robert Lansing), the quiet, practical tough guy, and Margaret (Jacqueline Scott) the thoughtful, sensible woman who clings to him whenever the bugs show up.On top of their badly-acted blandness, these characters aren't gradually revealed and developed, but are dropped on us in a heap over the course of one long beach-picnic scene. A few scabs are bared, chemistry fails to happen.., and then the ants show up and none of it matters very much for the rest of the movie.I could wail and nitpick my way through Empire of the Ants for ages, but since it is a giant-bug movie, priority ought to be given to the special effects. The term 'special' here is extremely euphemistic.Groan all you like about the modern fondness for CGI, a little computer magic would have gone a long way in this film. The ant effects come in two main flavours; the fairly lifelike, but not very menacing footage of real ants, which vaguely wave their legs around, climb up invisible walls, and sometimes face the wrong way, and the close-quarter model ants, which look a bit silly, don't move like insects, and are inexplicably furry in places. It doesn't help that the real ant footage has been blown up to look much larger than the physical models, so that the ants keep changing size. They can also pop up out of thin air. A tangle of huge, noisy ants can apparently teleport into any scene, even when the characters really ought to have seen them from a distance (or heard them. Not only do they emit a sort of fantasy-insect buzzy shriek, they also scream now and then. I don't know why. Maybe Coreen inspired them).