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• Empire of the pants. Shady business woman Marilyn Fryser(Joan Collins) is trying to sell dodgy real estate in the Florida Everglades to rich vacationers. She takes some on a boat trip to try to persuade them to part with their cash, but nearby a canister of toxic chemicals is leaking, and eagerly being lapped up by thirsty ants(why dont the blighters die after consuming this???). The insects grow to a huge size and soon everybody is in great danger.
  American International Pictures, A.I.P for short made some great horror and Science Fiction films in the 60 s and 70 s. This is nt one of them. The special effects are terrible, and its not a question of artistic creativity coming unstuck by lack of budget, as what we have here is real ants projected onto scenes with people in and made to look very large. It doesnt work. The model ants fare little better. Now, I never judge a film by special effects alone(I m a Doctor Who fan for goodness sake!), but there are great periods of tedium in between the ant attacks, and what should have been an exciting climax becomes a stiltled mess in Gordon s hands. This is supposedly based on a story by H.G Wells! For more Gordon eco-horror with a social conscience try the far more entertaining Food Of The Gods . Of course you ll have to survive the experience of watching this first. Pretty bad. 2 out of 5
  
• B Movie nonsense...NOT WIDESCREEN. Typical cheap 70 s monster movie. Not bad in parts but a bit repetitive.
  
  The Dvd is FULLSCREEN, not Widescreen as stated here on Amazon. There s a small sticker on the back of the Dvd saying This film is Not Widescreen, which covers the Widescreen info.
  The picture still looks good though, it s bright, clear and clean.
  
  Worth picking up if you re into this kind of thing, especially at the low prices it s available at.
• Awfully good. I went to the pictures to see this when it was released in 1977. I was 10 and I thought it was great.
  
  I saw the film again on TV in 1989. I was 22 this time round and I thought it was absolutely fantastic, so much so that I rang my brother at about half past midnight and told him to get up and watch it. He did and like me spent the next hour or so laughing his head off.
  
  Acting? Is that what they were doing? The acting is like a really bad soap opera, but with giant plastic ants barging about and getting on people s nerves. Oh, and eating them.
  
  Awful, awful, awful. Brilliant, though.
• Rubbish film, good for a few laughs. This is terrible. Thank goodness the Midnight Movies DVD release had the sense to dress up the cover with shlocky artwork that encourages you to enjoy the cheesier aspects of the film rather than the drama, because as a serious monster movie, it fails pretty solidly. Joan Collins leads the not-so-star cast in a tale of rampaging giant ants, grown huge on eating radioactive waste and overrunning a remote swampland location where Joan is leading a guided tour of prospective real-estate purchasers. The ants have grown to the size of horses and they aren t shy about attacking, so it s a fight for survival as the terrified humans try and escape the ant-filled swamp.
  
  The cast are all pretty forgettable, and even Joan Collins does little with her (admittedly 2-dimensional) part. Playing the part of a haughty, manipulative schemer is one of her proven abilities, and she performs adequately and it is always nice to see her strutting and sniping while she s onscreen. Unfortunately her acting skills fail her when she is called upon to cower in terror in the face of giant ants, but then, none of the cast manage to pull this off realistically with the very poor special effects that have to contend with. And of course its giant ants we have paid to see, so after half an hour of very obvious character setting dialogue and strolling about, we are ready to cheer as we finally see the first giant ants attack....oh dear.
  
  Well, it s not good. The ants are presented on screen in two ways, either in magnified footage of real ants performing on tiny sets, or giant fake prop ants bumping into the live actors for the attack close ups. The shots with real ants are sometimes blended together with shots of the actors which looks really bad on-screen, and you can see the dividing lines between the composite images almost every time. If this had been done flawlessly, the film would have looked great during these sequences because the close up ant footage is quite good, and on certain occasions the joins are not all visible (the old couple who find themselves surrounded when emerging from a small hut is quite a good example), but these good scenes are nearly always spoiled by the actors being required to stand rooted to the spot in case they unwittingly step outside of the patch of screen they are contained in, while the ants similarly rattle around in their portion of the screen, and the two sides never touch each other.
  
  The giant fake ants are another matter entirely. Big cumbersome props of giant ant heads and a couple of the front legs are pushed and poked at the screaming actors who seem to fall to the ground and become magically covered in blood without making even the slightest effort to get out of the way. This is most glaringly apparent in the very first ant-attack, when a man urges his wife to run away, only to remain standing completely still himself, waiting to be eaten. Whats worse is that every (and I mean EVERY) scene involving the fake giant ants attacking people is filmed with a wildy flailing camera that is constantly swinging in all direction, obviously done to avoid showing the dummy giant ants too clearly and for too long. It s intensely irritating, but you can t blame the director, as the model ants are pretty bad. They don t resemble the live ants very well, especially as they have big tufts of ginger hair all over them! Oh yes and they also make a very loud chirruping, whirring noise all the time...of course, because real ants are noted for the loud, electronic-sounding noises they make, aren t they? And later on in the film, they also scream, which I thought had to be one of the female cast members when i first heard it, but no, it s the ants, yelling out and generally overacting more than the human cast.
  
  There s plenty more lame plot, effects and twists to come before the end of the film, and all of it done with a really rotten script and some very daft plot devices. Right at the start of the attack, the captain of the small boat that brought the tourists decides to BLOW -UP the vessel - just because a couple of ants have jumped aboard! Surely any rightminded captain would think of a way to get them off and use the boat to escape rather than scupper it immediately. As soon as I saw this happen, my respect for the script went right down the pan, and I realised I might as well steel myself for plenty more lapses in logic to start cropping up - and they did, countless times.
  
  This film is a dud of magnificent proportions, and to think I actually went to the theatre to watch it when it was released in the late 1970 s. As a kid, I thought the giant ants were cool, but I must have missed all the awful script inconsistencies and poor acting. Some of the film is bad enough to be genuinely funny, so if you are thinking of watching it, get ready to laugh, because there s nothing remotely scary or dramatic going on here.
  
• Mutant ants!. Great transfer from MGM but my copy is not widescreen (while on the backit says so). Classic little monster movie from sci-fi meister Bert I.Gordon. Beautiful Joan Collins is the witty & yes ... bitchy landdeveloper (I m sure she was having fun while filming this one). Insectextravangza with over the top effects & average acting. Laughabledialogue, but you ll still love it.

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