B.I.G. (Bert I. Gordon) Double Feature: The Food of the Gods (1976) & Empire of the Ants (1977)

B.I.G. (BERT I. GORDON) DOUBLE FEATURE: THE FOOD OF THE GODS (1976) & EMPIRE OF THE ANTS (1977)

Killer giant rat films (giant killer rat films) do not populate the landscape as much as bad romantic comedies, bad teenage sex comedies, et cetera, do. They only come along every few years and it’s amazing we’ve not seen more in the aftermath of hipster environmentalism.

THE FOOD OF THE GODS is a bad film. A really, really, really bad film. Not a “so bad it’s good” film, just a plain bad film of epic proportions. There’s absolutely no suspense and there’s no entertainment from watching this incompetent film directed by one Bert I. Gordon, main creative force of the companion piece EMPIRE OF THE ANTS, yet another bio-kill film loosely based on a classic H.G. Wells novel. EMPIRE OF THE ANTS stars Joan Collins. Imagine the possibilities of a horror film where characters battle Joan Collins’ ego.

Bio-kill films came out seemingly by the hundreds after JAWS. We had mutant frogs, worms, ants, wasps, and killer bees. The animal kingdom — led by insects — will make us human scum pay for our transgressions against the ecosystem. See, we’ve screwed around with Mother Nature long enough and now Mother Nature will screw us.

Fond memories of THE KILLER SHREWS (1959) came back during THE FOOD OF THE GODS. Yes, the vicious killer rats in THE FOOD OF THE GODS look a whole helluva lot batter than whatever passed for imitation vicious killer rats in THE KILLER SHREWS (coon dogs, I do believe) yet that’s missing the point completely. THE KILLER SHREWS proves a campy good time and THE FOOD OF THE GODS feels more like a soulless mechanical assembly line production.

For example, there’s no mad scientist talk in THE FOOD OF THE GODS. Baruch Lumet and Gordon McClendon provided that during THE KILLER SHREWS and it reminded me of classic 1930s horror films like BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN and THE DEVIL-DOLL.

Ralph Meeker shows up in THE FOOD OF THE GODS as a mad capitalist named Bensington and mad capitalists are bad substitutes for mad scientists. There’s precious little energy and precious little joy in THE FOOD OF THE GODS. Had the Skinners’ animals been fed the script, we’d have never had THE FOOD OF THE GODS because a single morsel of the script would have poisoned every farm animal on the prerequisite remote island. They’d especially gag on the line Pamela Franklin throws Marjoe Gortner’s character about she’d like to make love to him, a crazy notion since they’re surrounded by giant killer rats. Coitus interruptus by rattus enormous!

Meeker and Ida Lupino are devoured by these giant killer rats. Not sure this is what they mean by paying one’s dues in the earlier stages of a career so one can later be devoured in a bad, bad, bad film.

Meeker (1920-88) had major roles in THE NAKED SPUR, KISS ME DEADLY, and PATHS OF GLORY, three brilliant films made in the 1950s.

Lupino, who appeared in the awful THE DEVIL’S RAIN just before THE FOOD OF THE GODS, directed eight films (including THE HITCH-HIKER) and seven of them from 1949 through 1953. She was ahead of her time.

Lupino and Meeker join icons like Ray Milland (killed in FROGS) and Kevin McCarthy and Keenan Wynn (killed in PIRANHA), for example.

Belinda Balaski survived THE FOOD OF THE GODS, but she did not PIRANHA and THE HOWLING, for those keeping score at home.

Notice how I did not yet mention the plot of THE FOOD OF THE GODS. That’s because the plot construction will immediately remind movie veterans of THE KILLER SHREWS, THE BIRDS, and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, all three better films with better plots.

The giant rats are not bad special effects, but they’re not the least bit scary. Winston Smith loved himself some rats in 1984 and we fill in the scenes with our imaginations rather than seeing Orwell’s illustrations of rats on the written page.

That said, there’s some really, really, really bad special effect sequences in THE FOOD OF THE GODS, as the gigantic killer wasps are every bit as scary as the killer bees in THE SWARM and the killer flies in AMITYVILLE 3-D. There’s some mutant chickens who provide us bad laughs.

Some day we’ll see a film with giant mutant killer film critics. We’ll be headed first after M. Night Shyamalan, as revenge for enduring his LADY IN THE WATER and his other bad, bad, bad movies.

The first sensible question posed by any reader might be, “Why do you review so many old movies?” A sensible question deserves a sensible answer.

Just because they are “old” plays, do we give up serious discussion of Shakespeare, for example? Do intellectuals give up on Marx and Socrates and Plato and the like just because they never had a Facebook account let alone have a place on the Hollywood Walk of Fame?

So “old” movies have a lot of catching up to do to other mediums.

Just a year after THE FOOD OF THE GODS, Mr. B.I.G. himself, Bert I. Gordon, came back with THE EMPIRE OF THE ANTS, another bio-kill movie loosely based on H.G. Wells.

EMPIRE OF THE ANTS opens with a ponderous voice-over narration that’s written like a combination of Rodney Dangerfield, Rickey Henderson, and Adolf Hitler. Our narration, obviously under ant control, lays it down that ants get no respect and it’s about time we stupid humans admit our genetic inferiority in the face of the superior ant race. It’s about time we stupid humans serve the superior ant race and we best “Treat it with respect” or there will be ecological hell to pay for us stupid, egotistical humans.

Once again, a post-JAWS horror film gives us an evil real estate developer. If there’s one horror film with an evil real estate developer, there are at least a hundred. However, evil real estate developers rarely take the shapely (and developed) form of Joan Collins. Of course, she’s a real mean bitch — potential audition tape for both THE BITCH and “Dynasty” — and she’s obsessed with the Bottom Line like all business people in bio-kill movies. Unfortunately, for us and coincidentally for her, the sight of her perfectly coiffed hair strikes more fear in the heart of the audience than the ants.

These are not the average garden variety ants. They are the brand of ant who had the great misfortune of being in a killer ant picture 23 years after the 1954 science fiction classic THEM! We do see a classic movie formula in action in EMPIRE OF THE ANTS: Barrels Labelled Danger: Radioactive Waste + Evil Real Estate Person = Giant Killer Ants. Extremely slow moving giant killer ants who laboriously pick off their victims as if the exposition scenes are not already bad enough.

Back to Joan Collins. Disaster movies of the era recruited fading stars for their casts. It must be some measure of the intrinsic artistic value of EMPIRE OF THE ANTS that it wound up with Joan Collins as its marquee attraction. For crying out loud, even FOOD OF THE GODS included Ralph Meeker and Ida Lupino.

A film like EMPIRE OF THE ANTS entertains idle thoughts. Lots and lots and lots of idle thoughts.

I started taking incriminating notes on the guilty parties of the opening credits and I came across this familiar name (and bod): Pamela Shoop. My internal movie database flashed back on a Pamela Susan Shoop from HALLOWEEN II (1981) and after some intense cross-referencing, it turned out this would be the same actress. She fared better as Pamela Shoop because the addition of Susan earned her a sweet nude scene before decapitation by Michael Myers. In EMPIRE OF THE ANTS, Shoop lives through a slime ball creep’s failed seduction and survives her attack by phony looking giant killer ants. Don’t forget radioactive.

After the basic expository set-up, the ants finally attack and establish a basic scene pattern, which I have reduced to (not in this exact order) BLOOD and SCREAMS and RUNNING and BLOOD and RUNNING and SCREAMS and PADDLING and SCREAMS and PADDLING and PADDLING and BLOOD and SCREAMS. I may have forgotten an extra RUNNING.

We get extra special treats like repeat ant’s eye view shots as they zero in on stock monster movie characters. Victims who just stand there and watch and scream. A victim who falls over what appears to be a single branch and just waits for her death. Of course, nobody brought any weapons to a picnic and outing sponsored by a friendly local evil real estate developer. There’s no guns, no knives, no machine guns, and, most importantly, no flamethrowers ‘cause, guess what, these ants hate fire. Of course.

Just imagine Devo in EMPIRE OF THE ANTS, in their radioactive suits and flower pot hats, killing ants by electric guitar and dangerous synthesizer grooves like the one that later powered “Whip It.” Devo could have even given us a classic theme song like the Five Blobs did for THE BLOB almost 20 years before.

Devo adapted their classic “Jocko Homo” and its “Are we not men? We are Devo” chant from a classic H.G. Wells novel. American International, producer Samuel Z. Arkoff, and Gordon also raided the Wells source material for two films. Wells may have predicted a time machine and cloning Marlon Brando in miniature form yet even his visionary mind never foreseen Joan Collins. Regardless, Wells should have written FOOD OF THE GODS and EMPIRE OF THE ANTS under another name.

THE FOOD OF THE GODS (1976) One star; EMPIRE OF THE ANTS (1977) One star

The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)

THE SPY WHO LOVED ME

THE SPY WHO LOVED ME (1977) Three-and-a-half stars

This is the best of the James Bond films starring Roger Moore (1927-2017) and the one that ranks with the Best of the Bonds like FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, GOLDFINGER, ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE, TOMORROW NEVER DIES, and SKYFALL.

I believe it’s no small coincidence that after our small Kansas town of Arcadia finally picked up cable TV, I became hooked on watching James Bond films on TBS. It also helped that I hit puberty during this Bond discovery. Bond just fits perfectly with an adolescent mindset.

Moore had the unenviable task of replacing Sean Connery as Bond. Connery established Bond in the hearts and minds of the public after playing the character in DR. NO, FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE, GOLDFINGER, THUNDERBALL, YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE, and then DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER after the George Lazenby Bond Experiment proved disastrous. (I’ll argue that ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE is one of the two or three best James Bond pictures.)

Connery’s first three Bond pictures especially worked as legitimate thrillers. He brought a conviction and toughness to the character that Moore generally lacked during his run from 1973 to 1985. Moore made seven Bond films, beginning with LIVE AND LET DIE and ending with A VIEW TO A KILL. In 1983, both Moore and Connery starred in competing Bond pictures, Moore in OCTOPUSSY and Connery in NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN, the latter title a reference to Connery’s reported quote from 1971 that he would never play James Bond again.

Moore played a radically different Bond than Connery and his worst Bond films descended into campy territory, everything from the cheesiest double entendres and over-the-top product placement to a cartoonish character like Clifton James’ Sheriff J.W. Pepper in two films and a Bond-meets-Blaxploiation plot like 1973’s LIVE AND LET DIE.

Connery got down and dirty, whereas Moore never soiled his suit. That’s at least the perception.

THE SPY WHO LOVED ME is a cinematic exhibit for that old phrase “third time’s a charm,” since this is Moore’s third outing as Bond.

Moore fits the character better and let’s face it, THE SPY WHO LOVED ME benefits significantly from a great Bond girl, Russian agent Major Anya Amasova a.k.a. Agent XXX (played by Barbara Bach), and a great henchman, Jaws (played by the 7-foot-2 Richard Kiel). Both Agent XXX and Jaws stand among the great Bond girls and great Bond henchmen, respectively.

On top of that, we have Carly Simon’s “Nobody Does It Better,” one of the great Bond songs with music by Marvin Hamlisch and lyrics by Carole Bayer Sager.

Jaws puts a genuine fright into Bond and we like the British super agent a lot better under such circumstances. Bond’s one-liners won’t save him against this relentless Jaws, who does take a licking and keeps on ticking. He’s a dedicated henchman.

We cheer on Jaws’ destruction — he does some great work on a truck — and we especially love him when he makes Bond squirm. Of course, we’re rooting for Bond, but it’s still more fun seeing the indestructible Bond against the indestructible Jaws. It’s a fair matchup, for a change. Silly fools that we are, we believe for isolated moments that Bond might finally meet his match. We hadn’t felt that way since ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE and before that GOLDFINGER.

Not only does Bond face Jaws, but Agent XXX wants revenge on Bond once she finds out that he killed her lover Sergi Barsov (in the movie’s opening). Will she or won’t she kill Bond? Of course, we all know the answer.

Production designer Ken Adam (1921-2016) did some of his best work for THE SPY WHO LOVED ME, and he earned an Academy Award nomination. Our megalomaniac Stromberg (Curt Jargons) wants to destroy the world and build a civilization under the sea … designed by Adam.

Veteran cinematographer Claude Renoir (1913-93) worked on his uncle’s films TONI and THE GRAND ILLUSION. His work on THE SPY WHO LOVED ME should have been a fourth Academy Award nomination for the film.

In other words, THE SPY WHO LOVED ME is a first-rate production and entertainment that ranks among the very best James Bond films.

Five best James Bond films:

— ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE (1969)

— GOLDFINGER (1964)

— FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE (1963)

— SKYFALL (2012)

— THE SPY WHO LOVED ME (1977)

Suspiria (1977)

DAY 24, SUSPIRIA

SUSPIRIA (1977) Four stars
This is one of those rare films where what would normally be weaknesses actually turn out to be strengths and help the film become a seminal work.

For example, older actors playing high school students (Jessica Harper and Stefania Casini were both in their late 20s) and dubbing only add to the weirdness and disorienting nature of SUSPIRIA, director and writer Dario Argento’s first installment in the “Three Mothers” trilogy.

SUSPIRIA is first and foremost a visceral experience, a treat for the eyes and the ears with first-rate production and sound design. It was one of the last films to use imbition Technicolor (used previously for THE WIZARD OF OZ and GONE WITH THE WIND) and it looks absolutely marvelous with its vivid colors.

You won’t be able to keep your eyes off the screen, even if you want to cover them during some of the more squeamish moments. Just remember the film’s tagline: “The only thing more terrifying than the last 12 minutes of this film are the first 92.”

Italian progressive rock band Goblin, who previously scored Argento’s 1975 classic giallo DEEP RED and later scored TENEBRE (1982), adds tremendously to the disorientating effect; Goblin’s scores for DEEP RED and SUSPIRIA rank with John Carpenter’s main HALLOWEEN theme and Bernard Herrmann’s work for Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers.

Disorientation is what SUSPIRIA achieves thematically above anything else. We’re never quite sure what’s going to happen next, despite the fact that we think we know what to expect, even in an Argento movie, from all our experience watching scary movies. We know that everything will be heightened in an Argento movie, just like other Italian horror movies by such maestros as Mario Bava and Lucio Fulci.

However, like a lot of those other films, all the elements in SUSPIRIA work together even if logically nothing makes any sense in the moment.

Urban Dictionary lists SUSPIRIA as “One of the greatest movies ever made — Dario Argento’s 1977 horror film, about a young girl at a German dancing academy, who discovers that the faculty are witches, plotting against her life in a series of ritual voodoo killings, involving sacrifices and vestal virgins on a pagan altar. … I first saw SUSPIRIA at the age of 10, and was terrified.”

Guess that’s one way to use “Suspiria” in a sentence.

NOTE: The 2018 remake directed by Luca Guadagnino was released October 26. The movie stars Dakota Johnson and Tilda Swinton, as well as Jessica Harper and Chloe Grace Moretz, and Thom Yorke (Radiohead) provided the soundtrack.

Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)

day 100, exorcist ii the heretic

EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC (1977) Three-and-a-half stars
There’s movies that are hated and then there’s EXORCIST II: THE HERETIC, a movie that received hate on an epic, violent level since it’s considered the worst sequel ever made and one of the worst films ever.

Sequels are often penalized for being too much like the original and then ironically enough, EXORCIST II has been lambasted for being nothing like the original mass phenomenon known as THE EXORCIST.

EXORCIST II director John Boorman admitted to not even liking the original film and his sequel is a direct challenge to the film that came before it.

I just want to know, did Boorman and fellow director William Friedkin ever get into a shouting match that degenerated into fisticuffs?

In a 2017 interview with IndieWire, Friedkin said, “I saw a few minutes of EXORCIST II, but that was only because I was in the Technicolor lab timing a film that I had directed — I forget which one — and one of the color timers at Technicolor said, ‘Hey, we just made a a print of EXORCIST II, would you like to have a look at it?’ I said OK. I went in, and after five minutes, it just blasted me. I couldn’t take it. I thought it was just ridiculous and stupid. But that was only five minutes, so I can’t make an ultimate judgement about it. It just seemed to me to have nothing to do with THE EXORCIST.”

Friedkin was also famously quoted, “And I looked at half an hour of it and I thought it was as bad as seeing a traffic accident in the street. It was horrible. It’s just a stupid mess made by a dumb guy — John Boorman by name, somebody who should be nameless, but in this case should be named. Scurrilous. A horrible picture.”

Boorman articulated on EXORCIST II in a 2005 interview with Film Freak Central, “The film that I made, I saw as a kind of riposte to the ugliness and darkness of THE EXORCIST — I wanted a film about journeys that was positive, about good, essentially. And I think that audiences, in hindsight, were right. I denied them what they wanted and they were pissed off about it — quite rightly, I knew I wasn’t giving them what they wanted and it was a really foolish choice. The film itself, I think, is an interesting one — there’s some good work in it — but when they came to me with it I told John Calley, who was running Warners then, that I didn’t want it. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I have daughters, I don’t want to make a film about torturing a child,’ which is how I saw the original film. But then I read a three-page treatment for a sequel written by a man named William Goodhart and I was really intrigued by it because it was about goodness. I saw it then as a chance to film a riposte to the first picture. But it had one of the most disastrous openings ever — there were riots! And we recut the actual prints in the theatres, about six a day, but it didn’t help of course and I couldn’t bear to talk about it, or look at it, for years.”

Boorman lived out the Jean-Luc Godard quote “In order to criticize a movie, you have to make another movie.”

The critical (and audience) reaction to EXORCIST II seems based on whether or not you liked or hated THE EXORCIST. If you liked it, you hated EXORCIST II; if you hated it, you liked EXORCIST II.

For example, BBC critic Mark Kermode called EXORCIST II the worst film ever made because it trashed the greatest film ever made (THE EXORCIST). Leonard Maltin called it a “preposterous sequel” and Gene Siskel, who rated it no stars, chimed in with “the worst major motion picture I’ve seen in almost eight years on the job.” Siskel ranked THE EXORCIST No. 3 on his Top 10 list for 1973, behind only THE EMIGRANTS / THE NEW LAND and LAST TANGO IN PARIS.

Pauline Kael, a fan of Boorman and a Friedkin detractor, wrote of the original, “The demonic possession of a child, treated with shallow seriousness. The picture is designed to scare people, and it does so by mechanical means: levitations, swivelling heads, vomit being spewed in people’s faces. A viewer can become glumly anesthetized by the brackish color and the senseless ugliness of the conception. Neither the producer-writer, William Peter Blatty, nor the director, William Friedkin, show any feeling for the little girl’s helplessness and suffering, or for her mother’s. It would be sheer insanity to take children.”

Kael on the sequel, “This picture has a visionary crazy grandeur (like that of Fritz Lang’s loony METROPOLIS). Some of its telepathic sequences are golden-toned and lyrical, and the film has a swirling, hallucinogenic, apocalyptic quality; it might have been a horror classic if it had had a simpler, less ritzy script. But, along with flying demons and theology inspired by Teilhard de Chardin, the movie has Richard Burton, with his precise diction, helplessly and inevitably turning his lines into camp, just as the cultivated, stage-trained actors in early-30s horror films did. … But it’s winged camp — a horror fairy tale gone wild, another in the long history of moviemakers’ king-size follies. There’s enough visual magic in it for a dozen good movies; what it lacks is judgment — the first casualty of the moviemaking obsession.”

When I finally caught up with EXORCIST II in the late ’00s, I liked it and liked it enough that it held a spot on my top 10 list for 1977 for a few years. Yeah, I seem to be one of those crazy, wacky people who likes both THE EXORCIST and EXORCIST II. I’ll go ahead and be a heretic, and I’ll step up in defense of THE HERETIC.

— First and foremost, I have never seen a dull or non-visually captivating and compelling John Boorman film. His credits include POINT BLANK, DELIVERANCE, ZARDOZ, EXORCIST II, EXCALIBUR, and THE EMERALD FOREST. As Kael said in her review, EXORCIST II has enough visual magic in it for a dozen good movies. I mostly enjoy EXORCIST II on the level of a first-rate sound and light show. I see the film’s looniness as a virtue, but I can see where that would be a problem with viewers who love the Friedkin picture. Never even on a dare (let alone a review) do I hope to have to explain the plot of EXORCIST II.

— Boorman’s beef with THE EXORCIST centered on its treatment of Regan. Blair earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her work in THE EXORCIST, although credit should be given to stunt double Eileen Dietz and actress Mercedes McCambridge, who performed the most controversial scenes (Dietz) and provided the voice of the demon (McCambridge). EXORCIST II gives us a Blair in a transitional period between her child star past and her exploitation film future. She’s absolutely radiant, glowing even in EXORCIST II.

“Finally, one day, the script appears,” Blair said of EXORCIST II. “And I felt like, ‘Wow, this project is amazing, it’s perfect, it’s fabulous.’ They presented a really good next step, for the film, for the project, for Regan. You give me these amazing actors. Richard Burton, for me, that was what got me. To work with Richard Burton, that’s still, to this day, is one of the highlights of my life.”

— Ah yes, Burton (1925-84), an actor reputed to be one of the best actors on his best days and one of the worst actors on his worst days. You can virtually smell the alcohol on Burton during EXORCIST II, so you can guess which end of the Burton performance spectrum covers EXORCIST II. However, I’ll take a Burton train wreck performance over Sir Laurence Olivier’s later “take the money and run” career work in, for example, MARATHON MAN, THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL, and DRACULA, where Olivier (1907-89) stands out for his mannered (tortured) accent.

— I am fascinated by sequels that go in the opposite direction or even comment and criticize the previous entry, like BACK TO THE FUTURE 2 and GREMLINS 2: THE NEW BATCH. They’re far more interesting than sequels that are more or less just inferior copies of the original film, like, for example, JAWS 2 and OMEN II and many, many, many others.

I would even say that EXORCIST II has a more original, more daring vision than THE EXORCIST.