Ants (1977)

Back in the video store days, I used to spend hours browsing the cover arts of all sorts of tapes. For years, I could tell you what a movie was by just a piece of the box art or even the font on the spine. Some of the art was amazing, some was terrible, and some just caught your eye. You learned early on that sometimes the production studios spent more money on designing a cool box art rather than making a good movie because in the end, a cool box art could garner you a lot of rentals.

There is one tape that stands out more than any other. I’m not even going to sit here and try and spin a tale of why this box art caught my attention. I’ll just say, I was probably ten years old when I first noticed it and well… it speaks for itself.

Ants was a TV movie released in 1977, no doubt influenced by the success of Jaws just a couple of years earlier. The 70’s and early 80’s saw all sorts of creature features released such as: Piranha, Alligator, Orca, and Grizzly. These movies were typically lower budget affairs that featured mother nature wreaking havoc on mankind.

For many years, I’d run across the box of Ants and my attention was grabbed. The movie was released in one of those oversized cardboard boxes which made it stand out on the shelf even more than it already did. I always wanted to rent Ants, but I think I was a little embarrassed since the box left little to the imagination on why I was picking up the title. Luckily for me, sometime in the mid 90’s, I did run across the last twenty minutes of the film on TV and found it quite enjoyable. It was nothing like the cover art suggested.

A few weeks ago, I found myself on YouTube where I found Ants streaming. I decided to sit down and give it a watch all the way through. Ya know what? It isn’t half bad. It definitely does not live up to the cover art though.