MonsterHunter

Things begin ominously enough when the unseen narrator starts droning on about how cool ants are and how they can do all this great stuff like push aphids around and dig up dirt between the cracks of sidewalks. They also have this super sweet gimmick where they spray pheromones on people to make them do their bidding! Sensing an opportunity to turn this dopey giant bug movie into a learning experience, I hit the world wide web to find out if pheromones could really cause giant ants to take over the world. It looks like they actually use this stuff to communicate with each other about dangers, sex, and the location of the right ant hill. I also made the mistake of looking into our own use of pheromones and found out that it is thought pheromones released from the armpits may cause women living together to have “synchronous menstrual cycles.” Whoa, thanks for sharing! Let see those ants beat that!

My curiosity about pheromones having been forever satisfied, I quickly returned to the film and settled in for 90 minutes of loser humans getting eaten by loser giant ants. Joan Collins is Marilyn, a chick who is trying to trick people into buying worthless swamp land for some paradise community with the prissy sounding name of Dreamland Shores. She’s not a terribly bright businesswoman though because she gives out all this free food and booze and boat rides which seems to attract a certain type of clientele - the kind who only have enough money for free food, booze, and boat rides.

She has some stud on retainer named Charlie that she pushes around as well as the gruff captain named Dan Stokely. If Dan Stokely looks a bit familiar to you giant bug aficionados out there, it’s because after he got done fending off giant ants, he battled an island of killer cockroaches in The Nest. Captain Dan scowls a lot, which is probably due to the awful denim outfit he was forced to wear as much as anything else. The passengers include an old couple where the husband is a real tightwad and keeps track of every little expense. There’s another old couple who only show up for the free food, booze, and boat trip. There’s the middle aged woman who just got fired from her job and is looking to start her own business. (In a community that hasn’t even been built yet?)

There’s the young, cool guy (Joe) whose personal life is in a shambles and I don’t know why he’s there except that Captain Dan Stokely is way too old to carry the picture by himself. Then there is the couple that pretty much hate each other and the husband whines about her Daddy and his money all the time. The husband’s name is Larry, but every single one of you will recognize him as Ponch’s and Jon’s boss from CHiPS, Sgt. Getraer! Yep, that’s professional television series guest star Robert Pine playing the scummy husband that we can’t wait to see become ant poop!

There’s also a boat in the area and it’s being operated by guys in red hazardous materials suits who keep dumping all these poorly-sealed barrels of stuff marked in big red letters “Radioactive” and “Do not feed to ants” into the sea. At least one of these barrels washes up on some part of what will never become Dreamland Shores and starts leaking. Naturally, this toxic waste is sugar flavored because the ants immediately run over there and drink the stuff up! I don’t know why this didn’t affect other bugs, wildlife, or fish, but I don’t suppose the budget included enough cash for a scene of a giant pelican trying to peck Robert Pine’s eyes out.

The long-awaited first ant attack occurs when the old couple with the thrifty husband looks around the swamp at the fire hydrants and water pipes that are sticking out of the ground of what in what is supposed to become Dreamland Shores. The husband pulls them all out of the ground and triumphantly exclaims that it was all a fraud just like he knew all along. The ants choose this moment to strike and it’s denoted by a high pitched squeaking that I guess is what really big ants sound like when they’re running amok. I’ve never stuck my ear down an anthill to try and find out what their talking sounds like, so I can’t say whether that’s a bunch of bunk or not. Another gimmick they use that gets old in a hurry is the ant point of view shot. This is characterized by a bunch of honeycombed shots of the action from the ant’s perspective and only serves to drive the viewer into near-fatal dizzy spells.

The surviving characters end up back at Captain Dan’s boat and see the ants attacking it. Captain Dan jumps into the water and swims out to save his boat which was amazing when you consider the quantity of denim that he was wearing. He ends up taking an ax to some of the ants and eventually gets his boat blown up for his trouble. He swims back and suggests that perhaps they should find alternative transportation back to the mainland.

Eventually they get rescued by the sheriff of a small, sinister town. As he’s driving them back to town, they pass by the really big sugar processing plant, but that probably has nothing to do with anything, right? Now, once in town, they try and call a pal in the state’s attorney’s office (What’s he going to do? Sue the ants?) but can’t get a long distance call out. It becomes apparent when no one will rent Captain Dan and Joe a car that this town is up to no good, so Captain Dan and the rest hot-wire a car and try and run a roadblock but end up in the drink. They get captured by the sheriff and are hauled off to the sugar refinery where the shocking secret of the town is revealed!

The queen ant is housed in a special chamber and all the townspeople are brought in once a week to her so that she can fart in their faces with her pheromones (So that’s why they brought it up at the beginning!) and make them her slaves! How dastardly is all that? How dumb is all that? Joan gets farted on, but Captain Dan has smuggled a road flare in his drawers and sets it off and waves it at the face of that mean old queen and he busts out and there’s this big truck full of gasoline parked outside the plant like there usually is in movies like this. Joe opens up the valves, drives the truck into the plant, bails out with a pretty good stunt roll, and everything blows up. All the good guys make it to a boat and sail off into a freeze frame finish.

There are some pretty bad special effects used throughout the film that deserve to be highlighted. There was the use of the tried and true technique of superimposing regular ants onto the action so that there are scenes where it looks like the characters are swinging oars at an ant that is walking around on a piece of glass and the perspective and depth are all wrong. Then you get the scenes where the film crew went down into their mom’s basement and made a bunch of big ant heads, arms, and bodies and had people off camera shove these ridiculous looking things at the actors, while the actors would writhe around like they had a really bad case of jock itch. Still, I’m confident you’ll have no problem overlooking those shortcomings since ant farts figure so heavily into the plot. Smells like a winner to me!

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