The Hive

When I saw the title The Hive, I assumed it was yet another bee movie. Well, it is a B-movie, but it's about killer ants swarming the small Southeast Asian island of Ban Tao. Shot in Thailand, one of the flick's first piranha-like devouring scenes involves a mom and her newborn baby — it's fairly bloodless and the CGI is painfully obvious, but it's a good kickoff to this installment in the Genius "Maneater Series" of movies. (Also see: teething tigers in Maneater, and salivating sea creatures in Eye of the Beast, and apes with an appetite in Blood Monkey.) Too bad it doesn't stay kicking… slowly but surely, the proceedings devolve into a blurry mass of blahness.

The Hive follows a group of gung-ho professional exterminators from Thorax Industries (I guess the Orkin man was booked), including one of the original Dukes of Hazzard, none other than Tom Wopat. (His previous partner in TV crime, John Schnieder, is doing horror movies, too. See: Conjurer.) Wopat gets the cushy job, lying on a cot, fevered after being ant-bit and infected with a strange brain malady (the army of ants share their mangled mentality with Wopat), while the other actors, unknowns, embody stereotypes. We have the hot hacker chick, the brainy babe, the brash rookie, and the cautious, scientific one.

The dialogue is hilariously bad ("We aren't here to negotiate with ants!" exclaims one of the exterminators, when his comrade is held for ransom by the irate insects), and the acting itself is trifling at best (no wonder Wopat wanted a time out — his character spends most of the time in a fugue, communing with aliens via the brainwaves of the swarm… or something like that).

The screenwriter is Oscar-nodded T.S. Cook (he was co-nominated in the 70s for The China Syndrome) and he has a ton of credits, while the director, Peter Manus, only has one previous horror missive under his belt (2002's 999-9999, which I did not see). They kind of cancel each other out as the sometimes smart story is left to wander aimlessly amid some pretty, glossy cinematography (by newbie Kittiwat Saemarat).

Kudos for the story's reasonable complexity — perhaps too much so, for a killer ant movie — but the death scenes are hardly gruesome; it's pretty much along the lines of something you might see on the Family Channel on a Sunday afternoon. The Hive looks slick and polished, but that's not enough to compel me to recommend this completely tame ant-ihorror movie.

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Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson