Gore-meister Stuart Gordon’s King of the Ants is a spare, harrowing and yet surprisingly
restrained psychological drama. Its
extremely low budget is everywhere apparent, but this is also a source of its
compelling nature. Whenever you
experience a film with real locations and actors who aren’t big stars, the bets
are off and you have no guarantees that things are going to go the way you’re
used to them going in mainstream movies.
Sean (Chris McKenna), an amiable but solitary young man, works as a
house painter and one day is offered a job by his bosses surveilling a
man. Sean does what’s asked of him, but
for whatever reason the bosses decide that he has screwed up and punish
him. They lock him up at a remote
construction site and methodically beat, torture and starve him for days. Sean eventually escapes, but he is broken
emotionally and less than stable. He is
bent on revenge too, with newfound meaning in his life as what he calls “the
Exterminator.” The film is certainly
violent, but it’s much more about emotional violence than physical, making it
very different, in my view, than what’s commonly called “torture porn”
recently. It’s also very “blue collar”
if that’s an appropriate phrase; free of the artistic and thematic pretensions
of similarly themed movies like A Serbian
Film and Kill List.
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