What's Eating You: FOOD OF THE GODS, EMPIRE OF THE ANTS, JAWS OF SATAN, FROGS

Bert I. Gordon, one of the few schlockmeisters whose career spanned both the 1950s 'big bug movie' craze (Beginning of the End, Amazing Colossal Man, Earth vs. the Spider) and the 1970s Jaws eco-horror phase, comes to Shout trailing clouds of toxic bughouse glory in two new Blu-rays this week. Food of the Gods (1976) and Empire of the Ants (1977) are now deep black spanking HD new and they may just save your life --in event of giant pest invasion you at least know what not to do. Flanked with a B-sides equal to their terrible majesty (Frogs for Food, and Jaws of Death (1981) for Ants) they come to us in deep lovely HD blacks and sparkling color where was all greyish brown streaks. When all else fails, we can admire how pink the natural light is beaming through the willows and fields of murmuring hemlock. For Shout treats these tawdry gems with the same reverence Criterion affords Kurosawa - those shadows in which normal size snakes and large ants hide are so super deep they're darker than the starkest midday shadows, and the colors and finery-- oh oh my children.

At the same time, Shout preserves the subtle grain of real film stock and doesn't eliminate it in favor of some waxy, 3-D, so these still look like 70s movies, like panelling. We of a certain age and disposition need these movies, for they deliver a kind of deeper vertigo-inducing version of nostalgia, a post-childhood dread Pavlovian trigger. All others beware: the HD now makes the contrasting footage of rear projection and overlays and special effects mattes very glaring; the splices and outlines between the humans and the monster and--the Gordon trademark--the transparency of the over or undersize being as he or it or they scurry or strut, they're all now so glaring as to be almost meta. Second, seeing any animal--even lower life forms like snakes and rats--killed, stunned, betrayed, abashed or regular bashed... is abhorrent today, partially because of movies like these (see my rant on Day of the Animals), the 70s natural horror kick, which taught us to care about nature. Hence I've given each film an unofficial PETA rating.



Food has one of those weird casts that makes you wonder if the great Bert I. Gordon's obsession with giant little things and little giant things is the result of a vision disorder like strabismus that makes it impossible to tell how big or small something is vs. proximity (i.e. are children really small, or just far away?). How else can one explain casting the ever-squinting, frizzy blonde capped toothed ex-child evangelist Marjoe Gortner, as an NFL quarterback? Why, he's no bigger than a silent snap-pass prayer, but there he is, practicing on a frosty field (or is pollution? Freeze frame!) going off for R&R to a remote woodsy island, just the boys, to hunt horse on deerback or deer on horseback with two teammate buddies, one played by the ever-dependable Jon Cypher and the other soon-offed by giant transparent wasps that look first like toys bouncing on a string and then like superimposed cartoons of wasps, and then--finally attaining opaqueness-- big rubber wasps carefully entwined in the zippers of his backpack. Marjoe will not let that stand; and the film is off and running as old Gortner climbs into the self-righteous power trip seat favored by so many self-appointed leaders in crisis situations, wherefrom he's soon battling a giant rooster, more wasps, Ida Lupino as the farmer's wife and an angry Ralph Meeker in a black raincoat as the rote capitalist pig, here to get a look at the white stuff coming out of the ground like bubblin' crude... the titular food. It works pretty well, but without a rooster the size of a UPS truck there's nothing to keep the rats away and don't forget the wasps, and the caterpillars biting Lupino's hand. Ah, I see her now, gamely moving these big blood-doused rubber worms around in her hand around to try and get them to seem like they're wiggling on their own; hear how her moan of horror seems to encompass the entirety of her fall off the A-list into and into old age, an almost delirium tremens style moan of low key horror. So howl, Ida! You have found in your pain the consolation of its expression, it is only this that the pain was ever for...

Teeth that could blind Erik Estrada

As Meeker's secretary, there's horror regular Pamela Franklin, disguising her British accent and real-life pregnancy (I'm guessing) by never getting out of her white leather trench coat (above), even indoors. She was such a little hottie in The Legend of Hell House, just three years earlier, holding her own against seasoned pros like Roddy McDowall. Here she just tries not to act circles around ole Marjoe and to add what little pizazz might be added to lines of 70s corner-cutting bluntness like "I'd like... for you to make love to me," as the rats close in. The much better-preserved Belinda Balaski, on the other hand, pretends to be pregnant, and young husband Tom Stovall worries about her as the rats start closing in faster than a zombie horde or a drunken Cornish lynch mob.

But then, endless shots of rats getting shot with pink paint in the face and body begins to weary the soul. I left the film feeling kind of sickened, the way I used to after feeding Mina (my pet black king snake) a live mouse... every week, another death... the blood on my hands accumulating... I had forgotten all about that existential nausea until this film ended. Mauling Gordon's well-crafted miniature hippie vans and farm shacks with such aplomb, those rats deserved better; maybe they weren't killed or permanently hurt (though a few sure look that way) but they seem to get a surprised, betrayed look in their eye when shot. As I wrote about Day of the Animals, part of the appeal of these movies tends to be in how the abstraction of the animal attacks (padding on bit arms, animal trainers doubling for actors) gives the feeling the animals are just rough housing, good-naturedly, and if the animals know it's all in fun, so do we. Watching that all-in-fun look vanish in an instant in the startled rat eyes in Food of the Gods drains the joy de vivre tout suite.

 That said, many of the overlays between miniatures, rats, and people still have a kind of chilling immediacy, and the giant chicken and rat heads that menace the cast, the giant caterpillar monsters that claw up poor Ida Lupino's game hand, and the hilarious climactic 'flood' when Marjoe blasts open the 'dam' all make this bad film shine like pure crap gold, the kind we wouldn't see again until Sharknado. It's that good.

I always thought Frogs rather overrated, but that was on the small screen, colors drab and faded by time and low res cathode rays, all its lovely nature reduced to green and brown blurs offset by a sickly yellow for interiors and he tedious red white and blue of Ray Milland's birthday party schemata. Now on Blu-ray the confidence director McGowan displays in its Deleuzian hat trick (i.e. we see a person reacting, cut to nature, back to person's reaction, almost like the footage itself is attacking them) is justified as the footage is beautiful, creepy, and in a way laconic. The interior mansion shots that used to oppress my childhood with their faded Colonial drabness now glow with a sun dappled pink that gives the whole film a 'twilight of mankind' kind of champagne cheeriness. Sam Elliott without his mustache is the ostensible star here as a laconic nature photographer out in the edge of the Florida's Eden State Park, snapping away when his canoe gets rammed by rich Brick-esque prodigal son (Adam Roarke) and his sexy sister Karen (Joan Van Ark), trying out their new outboard motor during a break between fulfilling wheelchair bound patriarch (and pollutant enthusiast) Ray Milland's regimented birthday expectations. All seems ripe for a hook-up for ole Sam, but the mansion is also besieged by normal-sized frogs, croaking away at night, driving them all crazy. Old Sam Elliot is invited home to change into dry clothes and the stage is set, in short, for much picking off one by one via various (normal size) lizards, snakes, and arachnids. Elliot's not as purty as Melanie Daniels, but he does all right.

Blu-ray image much better

Another plus: so the constant frog song can ring we're treated to the absence of composer Les Baxter's usual loungey helicoptering. Eerie silences cast a strange reverie-style mood over the proceedings. I'm especially grateful that Milland's wheelchair bound patriarch is more than a one-dimensional capitalist monster (as opposed to, say, Meeker in Gods). Instead, he's almost Ahab-like in his determination to carry through with the tradition of his birthday, irregardless of how many family members he's losing to the local alligators, frogs, snakes, and spiders.  There's even a shade of Col. Rutledge from The Big Sleep in his Marlowe-Sean Regan-resque bond between surly Milland and taciturn Elliott, each recognizing a capable outdoorsy plain-spoken capable hombre like himself in the other. Meanwhile, they go for a racial subtext, as the black maid and butler bond with the youngest son's black girlfriend and though, true to cliche, they're the first to insist on leaving to the mainland, they all go with dignity, common sense and concern rather than cowardice.
Their leaving signifies when the film really comes into its own, sort of like the climax of Orca or Jaws--now it's just the white man and the all devouring natural world, at each other's throats with no witnesses, sides, or seconds. Just like the old days. Not for nothing is the clan's name Crockett, this is the coonskin cap's revenge. There's no raccoons, but a snapping turtle devours a defenseless Lynn Borden; Sam Elliott bashes the surface of the water with an oar; and Adam Roarke swims out to his boat after something chews off the line, and the gators close in. And then... well, the rest of the time we can savor the gorgeous willow trees, sun-streaked fog and misty trees, the dialogue like "pollution control on the paper mill will cost us millions," dropped into normal conversation rather than underlined in thick script marker, and the incongruous mixture of wildlife that would only be caught dead down in Florida (like the New Mexican gecko), while we wonder how in hell they're going to pull off death by normal size frogs, and where that dog came from just in time for the very end. Dogs never do get a break in horror, the frogs get the best of everything. Milland really needs a different record to play other than lame marching band music to convey his eternal defiance of nature, but that old devil AIP composer Les Baxter will have his pomp. 



Shore-swept toxic sludge has a curious effect on local ant-life, their pheromones are discussed in a foreshadowing prologue as "a mind-bending substance that forces obedience." What does that have to do a slumming Joan Collins--trying not to break a nail as she rooks time share commitments out of a boatload of retired and/or attractive freeloaders, except that her pheremones don't seem to be working, so she berates and bitches in a brutal stereotype of the 'lady boss' who's hot but thinks she's even hotter. "You are terrific in the sack and that almost justifies the salary that I have to pay you," to the charter boat captain (Edward Power): "I'm paying damn good money to rent this boat!" I'll defend the Joan Collins oversexed bitch in the boardroom capitalist to the end--she's one of the decade's most defining sexual icons-- but it would help if the writers had some notion how to make her sound convincing. This on-the-nose stridency and jackhammer subtlety just makes her seem like she's in over her head - her sell is so hard it betrays the fact that it has never worked, and that she yells at herself in the mirror because she can't make her diamonds cry. Not that I'm complaining. Joan rules! The paltry 3.8 score it gets on imdb.com might be enough to put casual viewers off their toxic feed but I'm betting that would go up to at least a 4.2 once detractors get a load of how vividly this old queen has cleaned her antennae for Blu-ray, even if the dark shadows the drones used to hide in are now less dark, thus exposing the two contrasting film stocks, it's still the Plan Nine of giant ant movies. In sum, it is beyond perfect.


I'm glad old Bert didn't suss out the subtextual links between Collins' queen bitch and the queen ant, each trying to control the world around them, one through overacting, the other through pheremones. You can always depend on Gordon to keep things at a very primitivist level as far as adult behavior. In omitting all subtlety and nuance he creates a grand framework for our own projections. Ideally this comes too from the nostalgia effect, the dutiful attempt to create a cross section of America, so older stars and younger B-listers can intermingle and get a chance at a scene. There's never enough time to rehearse, so the actors all seem like they're genuinely meeting each other for the first time, and are touchy about the realization their agent has really failed to convey the requirements of the job. So it's natural that no one is nice to each other in the beginning, people hit on each other unsuccessfully and without a single entendre. So there's the frumpy middle aged office drone (Jaqueline Scott) who got fired after blah blah years for Mr. Blah, she hits on the captain; a girl played by the inestimable Brooke Palance wishes her lame husband (Robert Pine) wasn't such as a self-obsessed date-rapey coward; cute Coreen (Pamela Shoop) hits on the sulky pretty boy Joe (John David Carson) immediately after Pine tries to date rape her. And through it all Collins bellows through a bullhorn about where tennis courts will be and serves them more meals than in all of Troll 2. But the film wastes no time: the first casualties are swiftly followed by the giant ants storming the boat, which then has to explode to be saved and then, well the fire keeps the ants away, but well, then, it starts to rain. And then, well... dinner is really and truly served.

With all this gloriousness on display, it's a surprise that Gordon is so awkward and taciturn as an audio commentary guy, it's like pulling teeth getting anecdotes out of him for the extras on Ants and Gods, and when they do come they tend to be utterly banal, and often wrong, like saying Welles used Randolph Hearst's real name in Citizen Kane; or talking about going down to Panama to shoot footage of these special kinds of fire ants, but it looks like normal nature show B-roll and anyway every ant in the film is jammed up in ant farm, crawling against the glass (as above). Not that I mind; in fact I like the big fake ant heads here better even than the ones in Them! which never strike me as more than big carnival floats. Gordon's ant heads, with their jet black little eyes and hairy heads and jagged antlers have a real grim dirty menace about them that's lowdown, dirty, and almost convincing.



Who'd of thought the second best worst film of the whole lot would turn out to be the most unknown, a bona fide gem of badness. Like other Jaws-Exorcist ripoff hybrids (The Car, Killdozer), the title (AKA King Cobra - but Jaws of Satan is far more on-the-nose as to its cross-pollinated rip-off sources, even more specific would be Jaws of the Omen. As you can guess, a snake is possessed. Expository dialogue lets us know that faith-deprived priest Fritz Weaver has descended from a bunch of druid-burners, at a party. Introducing most of the coming cast, the local mystic lady says "considering your family history, father, I sure would like to have a look at that coffee cup" perhaps little aware that the then-current rage for coffee filtration renders divination fruitless. Shhh, the devil is coming, because a snake in a in a cage on a train isn't that scary on its own, so this snake has telekinetic powers. He can even bite people just by striking an 'invisible' terrarium (the director in his infinite wisdom can't be bothered getting a clear glass to separate actor and snake). Satan then stops the train at the town where his old druid-burner descendant nemesis is currently incarnated in Weaver's sulky form. Unlike other actors who channel their anger at their agent and biological clock into their performance (such as Lupino and Meeker in Food of the Gods), Weaver refuses to to perform any other emotion than self-contempt and weariness. "You know god, he can be quite a trip too" -this to a nerdy kid who's clearly never gotten high in his life. Weaver's even less convinced then the kid. What good is it being a materialist priest? He's wasting his own time, i.e. glug glug glug.


Meanwhile, the Satan snake has motivated the local serpent population to action: rattlesnake deaths mount, smaller cobras show up; an ancient text is read to Weaver by his credulous monsignor (Norman Lloyd, stealing the film) and soon he's chased around the local graveyard by the King Cobra in the dead of the afternoon, while all while normal late afternoon California life goes on oblivious, and he's eventually forced to fight the King Cobra from an open grave while it tries to get at him through the gate. Oh hahen doth Weaver seem awake at last, and the sequence is so badass creepy it feels kind of natural, like it could happen to anyone. King cobras really do chase their prey like that, so I'm told. The other star of the film, the Chief Brody role, is Gretchen Corbett (the spooky girl running around the graveyard in Let's Scare Jessica to Death) as the town's only doctor. Recognizing the big bite on the dead psychic's face is not indigenous, she calls in a good-looking young herpetologist (Jon Korkes) from the big city, but the gross coroner has already burned the body (you know he's vile because he eats chicken in the morgue). A satanic cobra loose in town could kill the buzz for the new dog track. It's going to be "the biggest thing that ever happened in this state." A very young Christina Applegate gets the film's only other spooky moment, wandering around the yard on a dark Lewton-esque night.

The Blu-ray of course looks much better than this grainy pic

Then there's great crisp details so ludicrous as to defy all explanation: the supposedly independent doctor lady heroine needs the handsome snake handler guy to ride to the rescue when a rattlesnake crawls into bed with her (she could easily throw a sheet over it) and then he needs to use five different snake-wrangling devices and a gun pretending to struggle with it, for like six minutes, all so they can sleep together. Bro, if like once you have a loop around its neck and the loop's attached to a pole, and you still have to really fight to keep it from biting anyone--and then, wait... wait... finally blow it's head off, all to wrangle a snake that even Ray Milland in a wheelchair could kill or incapacitate without looking up from his red white and blue birthday cake, then well, some might say you're bad at your job. On the other hand, what bad 70s amok nature horror really needs is more guys like him, for they are the expositors... the catch-all expert who walks around unfamiliar with small-town ways, or vice versa.

Applegate, Christina

So the dog race track grand opening is the kind that Aaron Spelling might stage: a jazz band and about ten extras mill around a sussed up high school track field. Naturally we expect a snake amok in the stadium, people fleeing and trampling children, Satan motivating the greyhounds to attack the band, but all that happens is Christina gets bit in the janitor's closet. I don't even think we see a single dog. Meanwhile, Weaver, converted by his graveyard scare like a born-again Scrooge, tunes heavenly antennae to yonder caverns for the foretold showdown, shoulding "SayyyyTANNnn!" over and over with the fierce conviction of a kid who knows his Lacrosse buddies are snickering in the doorway. In other words, aside from some real dead snakes and a distasteful episode involving a sleazy would-be rapist biker terrorizing Corbett there's nothing to dampen the overall mood of joyful disregard as the film travels the pre-set pathways of its namesake/s. And after the flames of righteousness have burned the reels away, all that's left is the wire that held the snake hood erect, like a thin little curse finger aimed right at those on imdb who gave this a 3.6. They might be right, but right only gets you so far... Jaws of Satan goes all the way.