Tag: The Food of the Gods

Kingdom of the Spiders (1977)

KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS (1977) ***
John ‘Bud’ Cardos’ Kingdom of the Spiders proved to be a pleasant surprise.

First, I remembered Cardos directed The Dark, one of the worst movies of 1979.

Second, I remembered the last time I saw Kingdom of the Spiders star William Shatner in a cowboy hat, yes, the absolutely ridiculous The Devil’s Rain, one of the worst movies of 1975.

Third, Kingdom of the Spiders starts out with the country number “Pleasant Verde Valley.”

Finally, Kingdom of the Spiders starts out slow, real slow, tipped off by No. 3.

Kingdom of the Spiders, though, kicks into high gear around the hour mark and it’s a whole lot of fun the final 35-40 minutes once the spiders attack Camp Verde, Arizona, and the tarantulas take complete control of the picture, hence being a pleasant surprise.

Kingdom of the Spiders borrows from such motion picture immortals as The Birds, Jaws, and Night of the Living Dead. That’s all part of the fun, when you enjoy something like Kingdom of the Spiders. Otherwise, it’s one more objection to a failure, like, for example, such bombs from the same era as The Giant Spider Invasion, Food of the Gods, and fellow 1977 release Empire of the Ants.

On the other hand, I have a weakness for Nature Attacks movies. There’s Frogs, starring killer amphibians, birds, insects, and reptiles, plus a crotchety old Ray Milland and a topless Sam Elliott. There’s Night of the Lepus, pairing a mutated killer rabbit infestation with a character actor infestation featuring Janet Leigh, Stuart Whitman, Rory Calhoun, and DeForest Kelley. There’s Squirm, where killer worms and a pair of redheads played by Don Scardino and the perky Patricia Pearcy wreak havoc on Fly Creek, Georgia, after one helluva storm. All of them are good fun and I’ve been known to call Frogs — great fun — better than The Godfather. Ditto for Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster.

Anyway, Kingdom of the Spiders works a thousand times more than The Giant Spider Invasion because it decides on real spiders — many spiders, how many exactly, how about 5,000, I mean that fact alone creates shivers down the spine — rather than a Volkswagen Beetle converted into a silly giant spider invasion. The Giant Spider Invasion doesn’t help itself when Alan Hale’s Sheriff exclaims, “You ever see the movie Jaws? It makes that shark look like a goldfish!” Giant mistake.

Also, the characters in Kingdom of the Spiders are far more likable than the ones in The Giant Spider Invasion. I mean, I eventually forgave Shatner for the cowboy hat — it’s better than the one he wore for The Devil’s Rain — and I even got over the fact that his character’s named “Rack Hansen.”

I remember an elementary school teacher calming the nerves of several pupils who were scared silly by a tarantula. She told us they’re harmless, they’re not poisonous anyway, they just look big and scary and very, very frightening indeed, and Kingdom of the Spiders brought me back 30 years to that moment in time. I’m just thankful our teacher did not show us Kingdom of the Spiders afterwards to counteract her moral lesson on tarantulas.

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