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With director Stuart Gordon, his accomplishments are both commendable and cringe-worthy. For example, I have seen both Robot Jox and Fortress, and it is abundantly obvious that the man was perfectly capable of screwing up. But allow me to refute that statement. The dude was a miracle worker! Gordon directed films produced by The Asylum and Empire Pictures, two of the most reputable yet low budget genre film companies, and somehow he created splendid films for them. It was good enough that he managed to create more than decent horror films while under the rule of Charles Band, but his biggest claim to fame was being, as far as I know, the only director who was able to sneak out a genuinely good film out of The Asylum, a studio notorious for their abysmally cringeworthy mockbusters and intentionally terrible movies about tornadoes and mega sharks. This made Gordon a genius.
Gordon partnered with these men because there was no other production company willing to finance what they considered to be a disgusting revenge thriller. The rumor is that George Wendt, who co-starred in Cheers, was reading the 1992 novel King of the Ants by Charles Higson and became obsessed with the idea of being in a movie adaptation. He even went as far as optioning the book from Higson, who not only wrote the novel but also wrote the screenplay. After working with Gordon during their Chicago theater days, these three men pitched the idea for almost a decade before production company The Asylum finally accepted it.
Keeping that story in mind, I think the very first question is: how violent, dark, and depraved is the scenario? The answer is not that much. Films that are more violent than this are made routinely without any incident. There is no reason to ignore how nasty King of the Ants i, considering that it takes place in a world inhabited by the most terrible people imaginable with a laissez-faire attitude towards depicting violent murder and other vile acts that do feel dangerous. Combining all of these elements suggests murder and overall violence are rough and uncouth. It is a grimy film compounded by the grittiness of its low production value that The Asylum inflicted on Gordon and his team. The film looks dirty, which fits perfectly with the dirtiness of the characters’ souls.
This is a classic story of gangsters and their misadventures wrapped around betrayal and vengeance. Sean Crawley (Chris McKenna) is a lost young man who has just begun working as a house painter but is not very good at it. Sean gets some friendly banter from another subcontractor Duke Wayne (Wendt) who suggests that maybe a real estate contractor Ray Matthews (Daniel Baldwin) might hire Sean. Unfortunately, like every other contractor at Matthews‘ real estate company, Ray is quite shady. In his first meeting with Sean, he gets so drunk that he croons about how wonderful his life would be if an accountant named Eric Gatley (Ron Livingston, in an uncredited cameo) investigating his books would just meet his untimely death. Sean wrestles with doubt about this and ultimately gives in by killing Eric in his house. After the murder, Sean is stunned to learn that Duke was ready to frame him the whole time, and thanks to his foresight of assembling a folder full of documents about Ray’s involvement in the murder, he survives.
The overall acting is one of the film’s greatest assets even Daniel Baldwin, by no means the favorite of the Baldwins, fits seamlessly into the cast as an egotistical self-admiring ghoul. Wendt goes a long way simply on the basis of subverting his harmless barfly image the wonderful thing about being so tightly bound to a single role as Wendt is, is that it requires almost no effort to transform that into something utterly grotesque and vile and Duke is a great role for the under utilized actor, burly and loud and combining cheerfulness with brutality to create a shameless portrait of a low-grade psychotic bully. McKenna sometimes overdoes his character’s aw shucks innocence the first twenty minutes or so, but which smoothes out nicely to his ah shucks insanity as the film goes on; although the film quite blindly and obviously sets him up as the character we are supposed to root for, he’s a frighteningly chaotic figure.
Gordon manages this all with a deft hand for tone balancing the absurd – the film is ridiculous often enough that it never crosses the floor into being unpleasant to watch. To make matters better, Gordon utilizes some of the tricks he learned when he was doing horror as he infuses exaggerated angles and lenses, and for one vividly strange scene, uses actual body horror, into the mix to make Sean’s mental collapse feel like the center of the film rather than the revenge plot.
For a young company looking to test the waters, this is an ultra-low-budget production. Gordon and cinematographer Mac Ahlberg have nothing to work with. King of the Ants feels like a cheap film made using prosumer equipment by talented yet enthusiastic amateurs. The movie does have a squalid, flagrant ugliness that fits the tone, unfortunately, the production designer tends to these issues by ignoring them. Instead of creating spaces that people live in, he constructs a bunch of clinically sterile structures that have been emptied of everything extraneous to the plot. I would rather not discuss the horrid sound recording and audio engineering, both of which were subpar. Sure, King of the Ants has talent and passion behind it, but passion alone does not excuse the astonishingly over-saturated feel of the movie. With all due love to Stuart Gordon’s gifts as an indie director, this one is a little too indie for my taste.
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