For Your Consideration...DEAD ANT

DEAD ANT (Blu-ray)

2017 / 90 min

From Cineverse

Available at www.MovieZyng.com

Review by Stinky the Destroyer😼

In the spirit of Oscar season, we take a look back at the 2017 horror-comedy, Dead Ant. 

You might recall this one, which was nominated in several categories, including Best Picture Featuring Heavy Metal & Giant Insects, Best Gratuitous Female Nudity and Best Song (the heartfelt ballad, “Side Boob”). It didn’t win any of ‘em, but I believe Tom Arnold did take home the honorary lifetime achievement award that year.

To refresh your memory, Dead Ant is about a has-been hair metal band, Sonic Grave, who are heading to a music festival - Nochella - with hopes of reviving their career. Along the way, they buy some mysterious peyote from a local Native-American named Bigfoot, hoping to stimulate their creativity enough to come up with a new hit song (the aforementioned “Side Boob,” which is funny enough to be a Spinal Tap song).

But Bigfoot warns them that harming a single creature after taking the drug will have disastrous results. Naturally, that very thing happens when their bass player (always the bass player!) kills an ant. It isn’t long before the entire colony - now much bigger - comes for payback, trapping the band, their manager and a couple of groupies in their trailer. What’s worse, the ants grow larger whenever one is killed. These characters figure that out, but pay no heed, so by the time they attempt to escape, legions of car-sized ants follow them to the festival.

Driver's Ed in Texas.

Like The Shape of Water, which did win Best Picture that year, the best praise one can bestow on Dead Ant is it’s exactly the movie you think it’s gonna be, with plenty of low-brow humor, occasionally clever dialogue, cartoonish violence and (intentionally?) silly special effects. I typically find Tom Arnold and Jake Busey pretty obnoxious, but they’re surprisingly amusing here, though Rhys Coiro often steals the movie as an overly-serious guitarist with a misguided sense of his own creativity. Elsewhere, fans of Sylvia Sweeney and her physical attributes might enjoy this early role, where she parades around in a bikini and screams a lot.

The cast certainly looks like they’re having a great time, which is kind of infectious, though I chuckled more than actually laughed. Dead Ant isn’t what anyone would call a good film (not with a straight face, anyway), but it is a fun film. Daniel Day-Lewis said as much after losing the Best Actor Oscar to Gary Oldman that year, obviously regretful over passing on this movie to appear in Phantom Thread. But keep your chin up, Dan…maybe there’s a spot for you in the sequel.