Ants! / Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo / Terror Out of the Sky (DVD Review)
- Review Date: Aug 14, 2025
- Format: DVD
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Director
Robert Scheerer, Stuart Hagmann, Lee H. KatzinRelease Date(s)
1977-1978 (May 13, 2025)Studio(s)
Alan Landsburg Productions (Kino Lorber Studio Classics)- Film/Program Grade: See Below
- Video Grade: See Below
- Audio Grade: See Below
- Extras Grade: F
- Overall Grade: B-
Review
A curious repackaging of three TV-movies on DVD that were originally released individually on Blu-ray, Ants!, Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo (both 1977), and Terror Out of the Sky (1978) are presented here on two discs, the latter two bunking together, and without the extra features from those Blu-ray discs.
Ants!, originally broadcast as It Happened at Lakewood Manor, lucked out by first airing on December 2, 1977, just as co-star Suzanne Somers’s Three’s Company became a huge #3 in the ratings that season and she an instant sex symbol. Later promotional material for home video and elsewhere featured a close shot of her bosomy bod covered in ants and the title was changed, though it also seems to be known as Ants: It Happened at Lakewood Manor.
At the seaside Lakewood Hotel, two workers are buried alive after stumbling upon aggressive, virulently poisonous ants near a broken drain pipe leading back to the hotel. Foreman Mike Carr (Robert Foxworth) and his lieutenant, Vince (Bernie Casey), dig the men out, but both die in hospital. Mike is the boyfriend of Valerie Adams (Lynda Day George), who manages the hotel on behalf of its owner, her ailing, wheelchair-bound mother, Ethel (Myrna Loy). Valerie, concerned for her mother’s health, hopes she’ll agree to sell the property to pushy real estate developer Anthony Fleming (Gerald Gordon), who wants to turn the area into a casino strip. He’s arrived with assistant Gloria Henderson (Somers), hoping to bed her between negotiations. Meanwhile, hotel worker Richard Cyril (Barry Van Dyke) begins a romance with backpacker Linda Howard (Karen Lamm).
The ants, of course, slowly converge on the hotel, spawned from an enormous nest. After critically biting a young boy (Moosie Drier) and killing the cook (René Enriquez from Hill Street Blues), health inspectors Peggy Kenter (Anita Gillette) and pompous Lionel White (Steve Franken) arrive, soon followed by the local fire chief (Brian Dennehy), as staff and guests are surrounded by millions of ants.
A quote by critic David Deal describes Ants! as “hilarious inept in every department: conception, scripting, direction, acting, photography, editing, etc.” but none of that is remotely true. By 1970s TV-movie standards, Ants! is reasonably well-made, filmed in British Columbia on a budget of probably around $1 million, the entire film shot on a 21-day schedule. That’s comparable to similar theatrical features like Frogs (1972) and Kingdom of the Spiders (1977). Ants! certainly doesn’t look expensive, but it is effectively, efficiently photographed and directed, and the performances are all fine, including Somers’s. Further, dramatically, as a movie, it’s far superior to Irwin Allen’s ludicrous The Swarm, released the following year.
Though modest, even perfunctory in its aims, except for the ill-conceived last part of the climax, when Mike, Valerie, and Anthony, trapped by the ants, try to survive until help arrives by meditating and breathing through ice cream cone-shaped tubes fashioned out of torn wallpaper while ants crawl all over them, the picture is surprisingly engrossing.
The ants are ordinary if poisonous, lacking the creepiness of tarantulas or the power of killer bees, but their sheer numbers, effectively conveyed here, and the many scenes of the game cast allowing ants to crawl all over them is unsettling. (During the climax, an ant-covered Lynda Day George helplessly watches as one ant seems determined to walk over her left eyeball!)
The location, a Tudor-style former boys school campus-turned hotel (sadly later demolished) is interesting and unusual, the filmmakers making good use it. Except for a brief hospital scene, the entire show was filmed in and around the building.
A big step WAY down from the modest success of Ants!, Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo, which originally aired just three weeks later, on December 28, 1977, has cardboard characters, an idiot plot, and a very remote menace. It starts out promisingly, with down-on-their-luck pilots Buddy (Tom Atkins) and Fred (Howard Hesseman) bribing Ecuadorian officials to look the other way as they smuggle a planeload of coffee beans to the U.S., unaware that a mess of venomous arachnids were loaded along with the beans.
They make their presence known in the middle of engine trouble and a crash landing in a field in Finleyville, California, an orange-producing community also facing economical hardship. A fire and explosion mean the end of Buddy and Frank, while the tarantulas instinctively make their way toward the orange processing warehouse, full of fruit waiting to be shipped. Among those caught in the melee are retired sawbones Dr. Hodgins (Pat Hingle), airstrip operator Joe (Charles Frank), his fiancée, Cindy (Deborah Winters) and her kid brother, Matthew (Matthew Laborteaux, of Little House on the Prairie), alcoholic police chief Beasley (Sandy McPeak) and his unfaithful wife, Gloria (Penelope Windust), she having a love affair with Rich (Charles Siebert), and Mayor Douglas (Bert Remsen), part owner of the warehouse with fire chief Bert Springer (Claude Akins) and Rich.
Both Tarantulas and Ants! (and, for that matter, Terror Out of the Sky) were produced by Alan Landsburg Productions (In Search Of..., That’s Incredible!), a production company that also made super-cheap TV-movies. Tarantulas is more in line with what one might have expected from the firm; after the okay opening 20 minutes with Atkins and Hesseman, the rest of the script plays like it was written in great haste. Other than the two pilots, characterization is virtually nonexistent—they’re not even two-dimensional. Most are unpleasant types (insensitive mayor, alcoholic police chief, etc.), there to move the story forward in the crudest manner possible: the fire that unleashes the tarantulas is caused by a reckless motorcyclist who crashes his bike in a gasoline-filled ditch. Characters become trapped in the arachnid-filed warehouse because idiot Rick causes a short circuit trying to burn the place down for the insurance money. Precocious Matthew is killed by the tarantulas because his idiot older sister—who remarks when introduced she has to keep an eye on her brother—completely forgets about him, letting the boy wander aimlessly all over town.
Although the tarantulas are identified as Brazilian wandering spiders (those in the film don’t resemble that species), their bites are generally regarded as only moderately poisonous, but in the film a single bite causes almost instant death. Regardless, unlike Ants! or Kingdom of the Spiders, where their sheer numbers are threatening, in Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo, except for one scene in the warehouse we never see more than a small, easily avoidable grouping of two or three at a time, and one of the characters notes how simply wearing protective gloves and boots eliminates most of the risk of getting bit. Here, only the unobservant seem to bite the dust.
The film has oddball aspects. At the crash site, where several people lie dead from the crash and/or tarantula bites, one looky-loo apparently is a high school cheerleader anxious to get a closer look. When she’s ordered to step back, she decides it’s a good time to practice her cheers. Huh? When Gloria is “attacked” by a single spider, the woman swoons, collapses, and rolls down a hill, painfully whacking her head against a tree trunk on the way down. Whether this is actress Penelope Windust or a stuntwoman is unclear, but what’s onscreen sure doesn’t look planned, and whoever it is genuinely looks injured.
The characters are, at most, paper-thin genre stereotypes with no attempt by the writers to flesh them out even minimally—Dr. Hodgins, the most developed of the Finleyville residents, bitterly stopped practicing medicine, but we’re never told why—yet the film goes for a couple of big dramatic scenes, such as Cindy tearfully viewing the dead body of her dead brother, Matthew, whom she didn’t look after. (Child actor Laborteaux is impressively corpse-like here.)
The Bert I. Gordon-like climax is another letdown, and once the menace is finally dispatched, there’s a long epilogue montage showing Finleyville’s citizenry going about their normal daily lives again, seemingly because a first cut ran too short and needed this unnecessary padding.
A sequel to The Savage Bees (1976), Terror Out of the Sky (1978) is better than Tarantulas: The Deadly Cargo but not as good as Ants! The story is largely restricted to just three main characters, allowing for more development in that area, but which also strains credibility in other ways.
The sole returning character from The Savage Bees returning here is Jeannie Devereux, played in that TV-movie by Gretchen Corbett (Beth Davenport from The Rockford Files) but here played by Tovah Feldshuh. Corbett was under contract to Universal Television around this time and probably unavailable and/or too expensive. I haven’t seen The Savage Bees since the 1970s, but vividly remember that film’s climax, with Jeannie/Corbett trapped in a killer bee-covered Volkswagen Beetle eased into New Orleans’s Superdome. In Terror Out of the Sky, Jeannie/Feldshuh suffers from nightmares that include stock footage from the earlier film, close-ups of her replacing those of Corbett.
The flimsy plot of Terror Out of the Sky has Jeannie and National Bee Center director David Martin (Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.) trying to track down several shipments of killer bees unwittingly sent to various beekeepers. David is in love with Jeannie, who’s in a stormy relationship with pilot Nick Willis (Dan Haggerty), he upset that she keeps canceling their planned vacations. This latest emergency sends Nick packing, but David and Jeannie need Nick and his plane to fly across the country in search of the killer bees (it’s the Fourth of July weekend), and he reluctantly agrees. The narrative sputters along without much incident until the last shipment is traced to rural California where the bees threaten a charity baseball game, and Jeannie and a bunch of Boy Scouts (including Ike Eisenmann) become trapped in a bee-covered school bus.
Its oddball love triangle aside—petite redhead Feldshuh, too-old Zimbalist, and hairy, barrel-chested “Grizzly Adams”—the screenplay at least allows more in the way of character development, trite though it is. The audience becomes more invested in these characters than anyone in Tarantulas and the climax, with a suited-up David luring the bees into a disused missile plant, is moderately tense.
On the other hand, given the notoriety of the killer bee attack on New Orleans in the previous film, you’d think the government would be more on top of the national emergency presented here. Instead, David and Jeannie, aided by Nick, are pretty much on their own, it being the Fourth of July weekend and everything is closed! For this reason, the script asks its audience to accept the notion that zero government resources are available to combat this national emergency, with David and Jeannie begging, borrowing, and stealing their way across the country.
Not much else here, unless one is interested in seeing Philip Baker Hall paired with Joe E. Tata as government agents, Richard Herd as a skeptical colonel, and Lonny Chapman as a standoffish beekeeper. Terror Out of the Sky isn’t bad, but not remotely terrifying, either.
ANTS! (FILM/VIDEO/AUDIO): B/A/A
TARANTULAS: THE DEADLY CARGO (FILM/VIDEO/AUDIO): D/A/A
TERROR OUT OF THE SKY (FILM/VIDEO/AUDIO): C+/A/A
As noted above, Kino’s two-disc DVD set puts Ants! on one disc and the other two paired up on a second one. All three are presented in their original 1.37:1 format, though all appear to have been shot for 1.66:1 or 1.85:1 cropping for theatrical release outside the U.S. Filmed in 35mm, all look excellent with clean transfers and decent DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono sound, with optional English subtitles. No extras on these discs, which are Region “1” encoded.
Watching these now-ancient, low-wattage TV-movies takes some readjusting, but for those of us old enough to remember them when they first aired, they’re moderately entertaining for what they are.
- Stuart Galbraith IV