Ray Harryhausen is most noted for using stop motion to create monsters. Bert I. Gordon is noted for using stock footage of animals or something and then projecting it in a way to make said thing look big. Harryhausen could pit two stop motion monsters against each other, Bert apparently had to entice lizards and baby gators or perhaps one of those caiman to fight to the death. With one you can let your imagination run wild, while the other you are watching sort of a unnatural nature documentary. Yes, I prefer Harryhausen’s technique, however I will always have a soft spot on my heart for Gordon’s “Empire of the Ants”. This is not Empire, this is a very poorly done space traveling film that may as well been a camping expedition gone array. The space travel seems very pointless here, you could of easily made it a movie about the discovery of a lost island, instead you have it be a space movie and the only thing to indicate it is a space movie is a narrator at the beginning going over the upcoming mission where he introduces the crew, that is completely devoid of a pilot I might add. Guess the ship flies itself because we do not have a pilot in the bunch. We do have three doctors and a mineralogist. One of the guys in the film is commonly called Dick and I have to say he was one. He constantly pushes one of the girls around and is an all around jerk. The other guy is busy flirting with the girl the other guy pushes around and wrestling gators. Oh, and he brings along an atom bomb, why one needs an atom bomb on an exploratory mission it beyond me, but I guess it is good to have around just in case one of the members of the group keeps insisting the group go to the mysterious island. I cannot imagine why, the rest of this strange new planet is similar to a wildlife refuge and the one guy could not even handle that somehow ending up in a death match with a gator. What awaits them on the mysterious island? Lots of animals blown up to look a lot bigger. So bring your lemur and watch as this magnificent quartet stumble and bumble around the island…where did that bee corpse go anyway?
