Mother Nature’s Monsters

The Food of the Gods, Empire of the Ants,
Kingdom of the Spiders
Blu-ray
Kino Lorber
1976-77
Starring Ida Lupino, Joan Collins, William Shatner
Written by Bert I. Gordon, Alan Caillou
Photographed by Reginald Herbert Morris, John Arthur Morrill
Directed by Bert I. Gordon, John Cardos

Underestimate Bert I. Gordon at your peril, his movies stunk on ice but their influence was profound. The director began his reign of error in 1955 and stayed the course for 60 years. Though his budgets were tiny he dreamed big: Gordon’s first film promised “a prehistoric world of fantastic adventure” but delivered King Dinosaur, a bottom of the bill snooze that only achieved feature-length status thanks to a superabundance of stock footage.

Nevertheless he continued to thrive in the land of giants as did his audience, a legion of children willing themselves to believe in colossal beasts and puppet people. With Gordon’s atom-age visions an essential part of their cinematic DNA, some of those kids would grow up to be filmmakers themselves. By 1970 he was no longer just an inspiration to those greenhorn moviemakers, Gordon was a competitor.

Though he welcomed the new decade with a Russ Meyer rip-off (How to Succeed with Sex), Gordon soon retreated to his safe space with two cautionary tales from H.G. Wells: The Food of the Gods and Empire of the Ants. Each film was produced by the resourceful Sam Arkoff who drummed up slightly higher budgets for the usually impoverished director yet Gordon’s skill set would remain unchanged.

Though the production values of these ’70s productions were far superior to micro-budget affairs like Beginning of the End, fading Hollywood stars and flash in the pan celebrities littered the cast lists and his dialog still sounded like it was phoned in from Planet Stupid: “Won’t you try some of the meatballs?” and “Where the hell did you get those goddamn chickens?”

The Food of the Gods takes place in an appropriately heavenly locale, the enchanting Bowen Island off the coast of British Columbia where an otherworldly goo has triggered an alarming change in the animal life; the peninsula is overrun with king-sized roosters while jumbo rodents hijack vacationing motorhomes. Ida Lupino, worn and weary but game, plays Mrs. Skinner, a true believer who thinks the slimy stuff has a divine origin even though it’s producing an oversized army of  “goddamn chickens.”

Skinny Marjoe Gortner is a football player on a weekend hunting trip, and Pamela Franklin and Ralph Meeker are two bickering pharmaceutical execs—the rebellious Franklin is a passionate idealist while the craven Meeker embodies the standard corporate ghoul—he has an unholy interest in Mrs. Skinner’s heaven-sent elixir. As the creatures multiply, Belinda Balaski and Tom Stovall await the imminent birth of their child which predictably coincides with a giant rat attack. Gortner is the hero of the hour and manages to torch the rodents, but the final shot of the gunk oozing its way downstream and into the mouths of grazing cattle suggests that a sequel was on the way. Instead Gordon got distracted by giant ants and a normal-sized Joan Collins.

Beginning with a portentous lecture on the effect of Pheromone on insects, 1977’s Empire of the Ants introduces its characters in a flurry of awkward exposition (Gordon’s trademark since The Cyclops in 1957). Collins is a venal real estate agent leading an expedition of investors/victims to a remote land tract in the middle of the Florida Everglades.

Also on board this anti-Love Boat are Robert Lansing as the weathered captain of the cruise, Brooke Palance and Robert Pine as a disgruntled married couple (Pine’s cartoonish misogyny insures his fate as ant food), and TV mainstay Jacqueline Scott, who plays a big-hearted dame with eyes for the skipper (her finest hour was as Cliff Robertson’s worried wife in The Galaxy Being, the memorable premiere episode of The Outer Limits).

Collins’s land scheme goes south when her clients get into a foot race with giant ants whose feeding frenzy is fabricated by Gordon’s typically shaky mix of matte shots and real-sized mechatronic puppets. Albert Salmi, another TV perennial, appears in a pivotal role during the unpredictable—some might say gonzo—finale, a wacky denouement involving galaxy-brained worker ants and mind control.

Gordon’s work in the ’70s was not just bad, it was boring, with none of the lightweight charm of his drive-in “classics” like The Spider or Attack of the Puppet People. The director’s insatiable appetite for exploitation rarely seemed cynical but by 1977 his delight in outlandish fantasy was replaced by the attitude of a man defeated by the passage of time. Drive-ins, Gordon’s favorite playground, may have been in decline but there were still those who believed in the exhilarating power of a cheap thrill; that same year John “Bud” Cardos made the best Bert I. Gordon movie in decades.

When Cardos died in 2020 at the age of 91, The Hollywood Reporter summed up his career as “Stuntman, animal wrangler and director.” A professional actor at the age of five, including a stint in the Our Gang comedies, Cardos worked every odd movie job imaginable. He was a familiar face in action/exploitation films and a regular in schlockmeister Al Adamson’s ouvre, including Satan’s Sadists and The Female Bunch. His rough and ready presence suited the biker film phenomenon where he added background color to Hells Angels on Wheels, The Rebel Rousers and Richard Rush’s seminal Psych-Out.

In 1969 Cardos was hired by Sam Peckinpah as a stuntman and second unit director on The Wild Bunch—surely a watershed moment for a jack-of-all-trades just turning 40. The following year Cardos began his modest but memorable directing career with The Red, White, and Black, Aka Soul Soldier, a well-intentioned exploitation oater about an African-American Calvary squad. Cardos’s experience served him well in this low budget environment, his money might dry up but never his enthusiasm. In 1977 he laid everything on the table with Kingdom of the Spiders, a monster movie inspired by Rachel Carson’s ecological horror story Silent Spring.

William Shatner is at his most lovably self-satisfied as Robert “Rack” Hansen, a range-riding cowpoke, scholarly veterinarian, and irresistible ladies man faced with a sudden wave of cattle deaths. Grindhouse glamour girl Tiffany Bolling co-stars as Diane Ashley, an arachnologist who solves the mystery in record time: the calves are dead from an excess of spider venom.

Cardos’s direction is the definition of efficient, and he bends over backwards to elevate the material (a real trick unless you’re a professional stuntman). He and his crew work hard to mix jump-scares with intimate drama ala Jaws but their efforts usually fall flat (the dialog, by Richard Robinson and Alan Caillou, is of little help). Still, there are moments of real inspiration, like a farmhand unwittingly slamming a door in the snoot of an attacking tarantula; the resulting pratfall proves the little critters make good slapstick comedians.

Cardos might have fallen short when it came to directing humans but he excelled in animal stunts, especially of the eight-legged variety—he even managed to get a soulful performance out of a frightened cow. With the help of spider-wrangler Jim Brockett, the critters have the assurance of seasoned performers, hitting their marks and toppling their victims like dominoes.

The finale should be appreciated by both movie fans and animal lovers; the arachnids aren’t the real villains in the film, it’s the insecticides. As Rachel Carson warned us, “it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature,” the spiders will prevail and the earth is their cocoon, insecticides be damned.

Kino Lorber has just released all three of these films in special editions—even the dreadful Bert I. Gordon films look terrific. Along with the excellent transfers each film comes with some well-produced extras. Food features a new audio commentary from Lee Gambin and John Harrison, and an archived audio commentary with  Bert I. Gordon, and an interview with Belinda Balaski

Empire serves up a commentary by David Del Valle and Michael Varrati, and an archived audio commentary by Bert I. Gordon. Kingdom includes a new commentary from Gambin, an archived commentary with Cardos, producer Igo Kantor, Jim Brockett, cinematographer Morrill, an audio commentary featuring Kantor and Tiffany Bolling, and an on-camera interview with Bolling.