Monster Movie Monday: Giant Killer Ants (2017)
Review Overview
Featured creature
4Humour
6.5Horror
3Matthew Turner | On 05, Jul 2021
Director: Ron Carlson
Cast: Tom Arnold, Sean Astin, Michael Horse, Rhys Coiro, Jake Busey, Leisha Hailey, Cameron Richardson, Danny Woodburn, Sydney Sweeney, Joy Liaye
Certificate: 15
Where to watch Giant Killer Ants online in the UK: Amazon Prime
In the mood for a creature feature? Amazon Prime has a veritable menagerie of monster movies, so we’re working our way through them, one killer beastie at a time. Welcome to Monster Movie Mondays.
Directed by Ron Carlson, this 2017 comedy-horror was originally titled Dead Ant, although it was released in the UK under the equally accurate title of Giant Killer Ants. They might as well have gone the whole hog and added an exclamation mark to it, partly because it’s that sort of film and partly because that would have made a nice homage to 1954’s Them!, the original giant-ants-in-the-desert movie.
After a trashy prologue in which a high-on-peyote woman (Cortney Palm) flings her bikini top, shorts and pants at the giant ant she is fleeing, the film centres on a group of rockers – including Merrick (Jake Busey), Art (Sean Astin) and Pager (Rhys Coiro) – who are heading to play a gig at No-chella, as booked by their manager Danny (Tom Arnold). Along the way, drummer Stevie (Leisha Hailey) suggests they get high on peyote, so they secure some from Native American Bigfoot (Twin Peaks’ Michael Horse, effortlessly the best thing in the film) and head out to the desert.
However, they fail to heed Bigfoot’s warning about not messing with nature while on sacred land and, when Art urinated on an ant, it triggers an ancient curse. Sure enough, the band are soon being attacked by murderous ants that keep getting bigger every time they kill one. Will they still make it to No-chella?
Sadly, the film opts for extremely poor quality CGI on the ants themselves, and the best thing you can say about them is that at least they aren’t as bad as the effects in 1977’s Joan Collins-starring Empire of the Ants. That said, the effects team do make an effort in one early ant sequence – after Art drowns the ant, it comes back to life and says “Dude, you just f*cked up: I’m going to make it rain blood!” – but there’s never a moment where the giant ants look even remotely real.
More to the point, the poor quality design means the ants aren’t particularly frightening either, despite the fact that they apparently eat humans and that their pincers are capable of slicing off a man’s hand (a potentially amusing running joke that the film doesn’t know what to do with). Ultimately, the film is too silly to be scary, although there are a couple of passable icky moments.
The comedy, at least, isn’t terrible. There’s a good handful of Spinal Tap-esque jokes about ageing rockers and hair metal bands (“Nobody respects a power ballad!”) and Tom Arnold throws out so many one-liners that one or two of them do eventually land. (“We’ve been through worse!”, he says, when one of them gets eaten.)
There are a few moments where the film comes close to redeeming itself, most notably when Jake Busey’s character suddenly busts out a few useful ant-facts (“I can think like an ant!”), as a result of watching Jeopardy, and the band spend the next few minutes trying to snap off the ants’ antennas. However, a lot of the potential humour is lost in the chaos as, after a certain point, everyone just resorts to shouting their lines.
The performances are probably a little better than the film deserves, particularly Coiro, who’s occasionally very funny, especially when interacting with the two young women (Sydney Sweeney and Joi Liaye) they pick up while securing the peyote. Similarly, the film does justice to the music, featuring two original songs that are actually quite good.
Ultimately, the film would desperately love to live up to its absurdly generous poster quote – “It’s like Tremors meets Spinal Tap!” – but it can’t quite get there. It earns points for trying, though. It you’re after a cheerfully dumb monster movie, you could certainly do a lot worse.
Giant Killer Ants is available to watch online on Amazon Prime Video as part of a Prime membership or a £5.99 monthly subscription.