Parents' Guide to Dead Ant

This movie isn't nearly campy or funny enough to become a cult classic, but it may have a little appeal for broad horror-comedy fans who can look past the low-tech CGI, gore, and nudity. Dead Ant is the sort of retro movie that Gen Xers and Boomers would have watched Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, introduce on her weekly Movie Macabre presentation. There aren't any real scares; the giant killer ants dismember and kill, but no one does much more than scream about it, and viewers aren't likely to care enough about any of the characters to feel sad if a couple of them die. If anything, at a certain point, moviegoers might hope for a Shakespearean ending in which no one survives.

Despite the movie's eye-rollingly ridiculous premise, a few ongoing jokes will elicit laughs, mostly centering around the way that rock 'n' roll has changed. Frontman Merrick muses that concerts are boring now without the pyrotechnics and the blood of sacrificed animals, and he deadpans that rock hasn't been good since bands stopped wearing eye makeup. There are other music industry jokes about the merits of the power ballad and how "commercial" fests like Coachella aren't where the action is, but rather the smaller, cheaper spin-off fests like Nochella. But mostly, there's slightly off-putting humor about Pager's ability to flirt with a bikini-wearing woman half his age and Love's sex appeal (she seems attracted to every member of the band), plus all the crass violence in which deaths barely evoke any sadness or grief. Horse (who is himself part Apache, Yaqui, and Zuni) steals his scenes as the medicine man who's willing to take the money of the clueless tourists he warns time and time again. This isn't a movie for most audiences, but those who yearn for "so-stupid-it's-funny" genre flicks may be OK with it.