Does anyone remember the episode of Macgyver about the huge swarm of killer ants that was terrorizing villages in the Amazon and eating everyone in its path? I remember it because that episode scared the SHIT out of me and made me terrified of ants, especially in large numbers. When I was in college my dorm room was besieged by a swarm of ants and they ate their way into my food supply. I remember one gross time in particular where I picked up a bag of chips only to find that they had eaten their way into the bag and there was a swarm of ants crawling around in the bag. ugh. It's enough to put you off eating chips forever. So suffice it to say, I don't like ants, so this movie about a killer swarm of ants was always going to freak me out, no matter how cheesy it is. Bring on the ants!
Like I said before, this movie is about a swarm of killer ants. This army of flesh eating ants takes over a jungle in Thailand and the ants go berserk and start eating everyone in their path. A doctor named Len Lennart (his parents must have hated him to give him that name) is dispatched by the government to kill the ants, but he finds it harder than it should be to kill them. Will he be able to stop the ants in time?
This movie has some balls. right in the first five minutes of the movie, the swarm of killer ants attack a mother and a cute little baby and they swarm and kill them both. Holy shit, they killed a baby! Now the ants are CGI and they look really fake, especially when they swarm on a person and eat them down to bones in a few seconds, but it doesn't matter how fake the ants look, they're still freaky to me, and when they do close-ups of a few ants crawling inside a person's clothes, the ants look real then, and they freak me out even more, especially when one crawls into a guy's ear and into his brain. Right about when that happens a fly in my room picked that point to fly into my ear, and I freaked out again. Damn bugs. They're ganging up on me.
According to another character in the movie, the main character's name is Horace Lennart not Len Lennart like the credits on Google search say, so I guess maybe his parents didn't hate him as much as it first apears. one of the main characters, Bill (the guy who literally has ants on the brain) is played by Tom Wopat of "The Dukes of Hazard" fame, which is funny to me but he does a pretty good job in his role and I liked his character. I'm not a huge fan of Dr. Lennart though, because he's kind of a douche, and he's the main character in the movie, so I knew it was unlikely that he would be eaten by ants. Bummer.
This movie was a Sy-fy network original movie, which explains the terrible special effects. When the ants come together in swarms and form these tentacle-like appendages just like bugs used to do in the Saturday morning cartoons I used to watch as a kid, even I had to roll my eyes, and when the good guys start shooting the ants with these cartoony blue lasers, I almost laughed out loud. Dear me, but that looks fake. The images of the villagers fleeing the swarms of ants are effective though, because their fear seems genuine, and when the movie is focusing on the villagers or like I said, one ant crawling on one guy's face, the movie is effective in getting under my skin. Overall, this movie shoots itself in the foot too many times with bad special effects. if you know you don't have a busget to make your ants look real, don't just settle for fake-ass CGI ants. If the TV show Macgyver could make their ant attacks look real enough on a TV budget back in the 80s, then this movie could have done a similar thing, and the fact that they chose not to is just lazy filmmaking on their part. If you're terrified of ants like I am, then you might find something to enjoy about this movie, and I did, but it disappoints me because I know it could have been better.
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