King of the Ants (2003)

The King of Ants (2003) is a tough, bone-crunching crime thriller in which an odd-job man unwittingly falls in with a bad crowd that, with disturbingly little persuasion and a small sum money, he is assigned to spy and then murder an accountant. After carrying out the assignment but not receiving his fee and refusing to leave the country when told to do so, he is imprisoned by the gang. Then events get even more violent and twisted... I’ll leave it there with the plot, any more than that will do it a disservice.


Overall, The King of the Ants is a serviceable film with a brutal edge, and the harshness of that edge should come as no surprise to those accustomed with the films of Stuart Gordon. For the first 10 years of his filmmaking career (85-95) Gordon was known for his gruesome and blackly comic HP Lovecraft adaptations including Re-animator (1985), From Beyond (1986), Castle Freak (1995) and Dagon (2001). Since then he had a change of tack and brought his horror tropes to stories set in the real world, most notably Stuck (2007), which was based on a bloody true story. So, as in films like The King of Ants, Gordon brings an atypical abjectness to these dramas, and in this film in particular there are moments of horror and sadism where it really stands out. During the main protagonist’s imprisonment the gang ties him to a chair and wraps some foam around his head and proceed to repeatedly beat his head with golf clubs, their aim: to turn him into a vegetable. These scenes hurt. As a consequence the victim suffers from brief but horrific hallucinations involving transsexualism, chainsaws and a shit-eating creature that’s bizarrely a cross between a giant cactus and a woman; Gordon’s Lovecraftian past seeps in to sublime effect.

Another noteworthy feature is the film’s screenwriter: Charlie Higson, on whose debut novel the film is based. The reason this surprised me was down to the fact that, for me, Higson was synonymous with The Fast Show (94-01). I was aware he had become a successful children’s author but I did not know about his previous adult books. It was like finding out Johnny Ball had written Hostel (2005)! And if I knew about Higson's early novels and his perverse adult film Suite 16 (1994) then this revelation would have been even less of a surprise.