Bert I Gordon’s 70’s giant animal movies. Have you all seen them? They’re as amusingly lunkheaded as his 50’s pics, but with the joys of bad 70’s fashions (though thankfully they’re still relatively old fashioned in their structure and avoid going into gross and gritty 70’s territory). Food of the Gods is probably the more entertaining pic and seems to get going a bit faster, but while Empire of the Ants is a tad slower, it lands in a more interesting direction by the time it ends. Both are good cheesy fun and highly riffable. I’d be happy to see either or both of them used as experiments in the increasingly unlikely event we get a season 14.
Kino just put them out on Blu Ray this week. I previously had them as DVDs on MGM’s Midnite Movies series (but sold them over the years). Shout had put them out as prior BDs in two packs with other films, but I never got around to grabbing those. I picked up the new BDs this week and the upgraded picture quality is very welcome.
As a child of the Seventies (The 1970’s!), I have seen Food of the Gods more times than I wish to recall. It was also the beginning of the heyday of HBO, and I must have seen that movie a dozen times.
You’d think that H.G. Wells, what with his vast scientific knowledge would have known that giant insects can’t exist, which was so quickly explained by my parents and their friends.
The animal that scared everyone were the giant rats. Anyone with any real experience with the critters can tell you why.
The funny thing is that Village of the Giants took odd bits and pieces from the Wells book. Like there are giant ducks in the Wells book too… which is how the giantism is spread because they’re added to the food chain. And the idea that the young giants are going to take over unless someone stops them is out of the book too. It’s weird. It’s like Bert flipped to random pages of the book, took out those ideas, then made a movie around them.
I’m sure if I knew the ins and outs of Well’s source material I may find a passing reference or two, but I’m very sure Bert was like, “This book has large animals in it, let’s say it’s an adaptation!” cause it was AIP and that’s how it works!
Kino, hu, interesting. They have some good stuff (I have some Keaton’s from them, the “Kolchak: Night Stalker” and “Outer Limits” sets, to name a few - on their last B&N sale I picked up “Breezy” and was happy with the picture quality and the commentary track)
The first poll I ever attempted was about Mr. B.I.G. - one of the questions was which film, which hadn’t been done. would you like to see MST tackle, the top vote getter was Ants, followed by Food
I’ve actually never seen Ants -gasp- I see it’s at Tubi, so I could watch it with adds if I wanted to.
I have seen Food, primarily because I’m a Pamela Franklin fan (I actually bought Kino’s “And Soon the Darkness” with her). And it has Ida Lupino, you can’t go wrong with Ida.
Lol, I could say that about quite a few entries in my movie collection.
I don’t think these two flicks are quite in the same league as Plan 9 From Outer Space or Sinbad of the Seven Seas or Robot Monster in terms of their bad movie entertainment value, but they are enjoyably cheesy to me in ways some of the similar fare from the 70’s weren’t. What can I say? I like em.
The book is much more of a social commentary than an account of plausibility. Wells was a scientist, but most of his novels were really about social commentary- The Time Machine was about the British class system, The War of the Worlds was about British colonialism, etc.
