King of the Ants (2003)

(In French, On Cable TV, April 2022) Seeing “The Asylum presents” pop up at the beginning of a film is usually a warning. With very few exceptions, The Asylum specializes in bottom-of-the-barrel genre productions with inane scripts, terrible special effects and cheap production values. But that’s now – The Asylum started with slightly loftier intentions, and early production King of the Ants is a glimpse at what may have been a very different company had it not found a more profitable racket. One notable difference is the calibre of the director: Stuart Gordon doesn’t have an impeccable filmography, but you can’t talk about him without mentioning Re-Animator and From Beyond, and that’s already a better filmography than most of The Asylum’s other directors. The result can be seen in the mean thriller that flows from King of the Ants’ opening moments, as a young man gets caught in a sombre assassination to ensure that a corruption scandal is never brought to light. Clearly influenced by a sadistic strain of neo-noir, it charts in often painful and gory detail the downfall of its protagonist through ever-escalating moral degradation and violence. King of the Ants never lets good taste or plausibility win when there’s an opportunity to be gross or gory – there’s a particular juncture at the mid-point of the film where we’re supposed to accept that the bad guys’ plan is to beat the protagonist into brain-damaged amnesia. It’s ludicrous, but it’s meant to make viewers feel intensely uncomfortable and that fits in the film’s logic. As a result, King of the Ants eventually becomes too contrived and mean-spirited to remain engaging: the tricks of the screenwriter (Charlie Higson, adapting his own novel) become too outlandish, and don’t help the film find a consistent tone in-between dark suspense or outright horror. It’s nice to see a few C-list actors show up for a while, most notably George Wendt in a very dark role, Ron Livingstone in a short cameo and Kari Wuhrer as the film’s lone female character of note (and object of the protagonist’s desire). I’ll give King of the Ants one backhanded compliment, though: as flawed and ugly as it is, it’s notably more striking than the average film that The Asylum would go one to churn on a regular basis.