The film blends high-velocity, high-octane action with tense drama and an exploration of human relationships to produce the perfect entertaining and scary cocktail. Yeah, right. The music of the film is a cheap rip-off the Jaws music, simple and supposedly scary, but in actual fact merely irritating. It is the film's best feature. I have not read the original H.G.Wells story, so cannot tell how well the plot keeps to his idea, but the screenplay is as awful as it is unrealistic- and I mean that notwithstanding the giant ants! The characters are unbelievable and have a knack for being singularly unable to run away, ever. Survival instincts are not rife among the actual actors, either: with the possible exception of Collins, the performances were so wooden (Ed Wood would have been proud, one feels, especially of the taxi driver at the start, in my eyes the very worst performer of the bunch, and he's up against stiff competition): it is hard to see how any of them ever got any work after this film. That said, not only the actors are at fault. The effects are awful, even for 1977, action seems to revolve around the camera merely shaking to and fro: I can think of nothing good to say about this film. It's not so bad it's good in the way Plan 9 from Outer Space is, it's just awful, tedious, boring- you get my drift. Not worth spending one and a half hours of your life on.
